BOOKS AND AUTHORS. 
Lotze’s Ontology — The Problem of Being. 
So long as man delights in the pure activity of reason, the funda- 
mental question of philosophy will reappear in varied form. 
To recapitulate the various views as to what consitutes being 
would be to review the course of philosophy from the Eleatics with 
their Pure Being to modern materialism with its omnipotent atoms. 
To define the terms employed in the discussion would be a repetition 
of the task of W olff, who taught philosophy the modern tongue, and 
of the task of Hegel, whose subtile analysis seems to have ex- 
hausted the possibility of further dismemberment, if, indeed, it has not 
so divorced the essentials from the essence as entirely to dissipate being 
in the dust of formal logic. 
No recent writer has contributed more substantially to the solu- 
tion of this problem than Hermann Lotze, whose writings are just be- 
coming known and appreciated in this country in spite of the inade- 
quate and possitively inaccurate translations which furnish the medium 
through which his thought reaches the English-reading public. Lotze 
is especially valuable on account of his clear statements of the limita- 
tion of the sphere of psychological investigation, and because of the 
tonic antagonism of his monistic idealism to the prevalent dualism or 
mechanical materialism. 
We need at the outset to notice a peculiar apparent contradiction 
in his method. He explicitly states that metaphysic precedes psychol- 
ogy in natural order, and compares the reverse procedure to the tuning 
of instruments before a concert. Lotze correctly states that ‘‘every 
one must, in the last instance, judge of every proposition submitted to 
him upon grounds of which the constraining force presses upon him 
with immediate assurance.” This is, however, far from convincing us 
of the irrelevancy of close inspection of the source, content, and rela- 
tions of the given proposition. To his figure we might rejoin that to 
precede psychology by metaphysics is like painting a picture with an 
empty color-box. The contradiction is more apparent than real, for 
evidently Lotze would search for the metaphysical in the psychological 
content, for he says “the history of science shows that those who 
resolutely set themselves to mastering certain problems generally found 
their cognizance of the available appliances and of the use of them 
grew keener in the use, while, on the other hand, the pretentious 
occupation with theories of cognition has seldom led to any solid re- 
sult.” How to sever the content of cognition from the process of 
cognition becomes a hopeless problem from the subjective and dyna- 
mical point of view of our author, and need not be solved in practice. 
