Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/631

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LOTZE. 609 awakened in spirits by the action of external stimuli, the world would lack its essential culmination. The purpose of things is to be known, experienced, and enjoyed by spirits. The truth of cognition consists in the fact that it opens up the meaning and destination of the world. That which ought to be is the ground of that which is ; that which is exists in order to the realization of values in it; the good is the only real. It is true that we are not permitted to pene- trate farther than to the general conviction that the Idea of the good is the ground and end of the world ; the question, how the world has arisen from this supreme Idea as from the absolute and why just this world with its determinate forms and laws has arisen, is unanswerable. We under- stand the meaning of the play, but we do not see the machinery by which it is produced at work behind the stage. In ethics Lotze emphasizes with Fechner the inseparability of the good and pleasure : it is impossible to state in what the worth or goodness of a good is to con- sist, if it be conceived out of all relation to a spirit capable of finding enjoyment in it. If Lotze's philosophy harmoniously combines Herbartian and Fichteo-Hegelian elements, Eduard von Hartmann (born 1842; until 1864 a soldier, now a man of letters in Berlin) aims at a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel; with the pessimism of the former he unites the evolutionism of the latter, and while the one conceives the nature of the world-ground as irrational will, and the other as the logical Idea, he follows the example of Schelling in his later days by making will and representation equally legitimate at- tributes of his absolute, the Unconscious. His principal theoretical work, The Philosopliy of the Unconscious, 1869 (lOth ed., 1891 ; English translation, by Coupland, 1884), was followed in 1879 by his chief ethical one. The Moral Con- sciousness {2d ed., 1886, in the Selected Works); the two works on the philosophy of religion. The Religious Conscioiis- ness of Humanity in the Stages of its Development, 1881, and The Religion of Spirit, 1882, together form the third chief work {The Self Disintegration of Christianity and the Religion of the Future, 1874, and The Crisis of Christianity ifi Modern Theology, 1880, are to be regarded as forerunners of