Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/276

 Rh, demands its explanation, an explanation which—according to the principles of science and after the analogy of the explanation of colors and tones—can be found only in the reciprocity of elements. These elements must therefore be still more simple than the atoms of natural science. They cannot be extended, but must be centers of force by the interactions of which the phenomenon which we call extension arises.

But this interaction would be inconceivable if the ultimate elements in themselves were absolutely independent. The only way in which the element A can affect the element B requires that A and B are not absolutely different entities; their respective states must really be the states of one and the same principle which comprehends them both: this is the only way of explaining the possibility of an inner (immanent) transition from a status A to a status B. We are thus driven to the ultimate concept of an original substance (as above to the ultimate concept of centers of force). Beyond this the analysis of the concept of mechanism cannot go.

But there is likewise another source of information on this point. Where analysis fails we must resort to analogy. Lotze saw that analogy is the only recourse for the authentication of metaphysical idealism with a clearness nowhere to be found before him except in Leibnitz, Fries and Beneke. Is being in its ultimate nature spiritual or material? Lotze answers this question by saying, that if we wish to explain the unknown by reference to the known, we must inevitably construe everything material as the eternal manifestation of spiritual reality. Matter (or better materiality) is only known to us as objective, whilst we know the spiritual from our own subjectivity, as immediately identical with "our self."