Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/24

Rh 12 L T L T Syrtic district, and says that a caravan route led from it to Egypt. The lotus still grows there in great abundance. It is a prickly shrub, the jujube tree, bearing a fruit of a sweet taste, compared by Herodotus to that of the date ; it is still eaten by the natives, and a kind of wine is made from the juice (see JUJUBE). Marvellous tales were current among the early Greeks of the virtues of the lotus, as we see in Odys., ix. 84. When Ulysses comes to the coast many of his sailors eat the lotus and lose all wish to return home. The idea has been worked up by Tennyson ill a very fine poem. This lotus must not be confounded with the Egyptian plant, a kind of water-lily that grows in the Nile. See Hitter, Erdkitnde, i. ; and Heeren, Ideen, ii., or in Historical liesearchef, &c. LOTZE, HUDOLPH HERMANN, one of the most eminent philosophers of our age, was born May 21, 1817, in Bautzen, in the kingdom of Saxony, and died at Berlin 1st July 1881. The incidents of the life of a philosopher, especially if his career has been exclusively an academic one, are usually passed over as unimportant. In external events no life could be less striking than that of Lotze, who, moreover, was of a retiring disposition, and was forced through delicate health to seclude himself from even such external excitement and dissipation as the quiet university town of Gottingen, where he passed nearly forty years of his life, might afford. His interests on the contrary, as exhibited in his various writings, are most universal ; and in a surprising degree he possessed the power of appreciat ing the wants of practical life, and the demands of a civili zation so com plicated as that of our age, so full of elements which have not yet yielded to scientific treatment. But, although in his teachings he rose more than most thinkers beyond the temporary and casual influences which sur rounded him, it was significant for the development of his ideas that the same country produced him which gave to Germany Lessing and Fichte, that he received his education in the gymnasium of Zittau under the guidance of eminent and energetic teachers, who nursed in him a love and tasteful appreciation of the classical authors, of which in much later years he gave a unique example in his masterly translation of the Antigone of Sophocles into Latin, and that, himself the son of a physician, he went to the university of Leipsic as a student of philosophy and natural sciences, but enlisted officially as a student of medicine. He was then only seventeen. It appears that thus early Lotze s studies were governed by two distinct interests and emanated from two centres. The first was his scientific interest and culture, based upon mathematical and physical studies, under the guidance of such eminent representatives of modern exact research as E. H. Weber, W. Volckmann, and G. T. Fechner. The others were his sesthetical and artistic predilections, which were developed uuder the care of C. H. Weisse. . To the former he owes his appreciation of exact investigation and a complete knowledge of the aims of science, to the latter an equal admiration for the great circle of ideas which had been cultivated and diffused through the teachings of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. But each of these aspects, which early in life must have been familiar to him, exerted on the other a tempering and modifying influence. The true method of science which he possessed forced him to con demn as useless the entire form which Schelling s and Hegel s expositions had adopted, especially the dialectic method of the latter, whilst his love of art and beauty, and his appreciation of moral purposes, revealed to him the existence beyond the phenomenal world of a world of values or worths into which no exact science could pene trate. It is evident how this initial position at once defined to him a variety of tasks which philosophy had to perform. First there were the natural sciences themselves only just emerging from an unclear conception of their true method, especially those which studied the borderland of physical and mental phenomena, the medical sciences, pre-eminently that science which has since become so popular, ths science of biology. Lotze s first essay was his dissertation De futures, biologise principibus 2^hilosophicis, with which he gained (1838) the degree of doctor of medicine, after having only four months previously got the degree of doctor of philosophy. Then, secondly, there arose the question whether the methods of exact science sufficed to explain the connexion of phenomena, or whether for the explana tion of this the thinking mind was forced to resort to some hypothesis not immediately verifiable by observation, but dictated by our higher aspirations and interests. And, if to satisfy these we were forced to maintain the existence of a world of moral standards, it was, thirdly, necessary to form some opinion as to the relation of these moral standards of value to the forms and facts of phenomenal existence. These different tasks, which philosophy had to fulfil, mark pretty accurately the aims of Lotze s writings, and the order in which they were published. But, though he laid the foundation of his philosophical system very early, in his Metaphysik (Leipsic, 1841) and his Logtk (1843), and commenced lecturing when only twenty-two years old on philosophical subjects, in Leipsic, though he accepted in 1844 a call to Gottingen to fill the chair of philosophy which had become vacant through the death of Herbart, he did not proceed to an exhaustive development of his peculiar views till very much later, and only during the last decade of his life, after having matured them in his eminently popular lectures, did he with much hesitation venture to present his ideas in something like a systematic form. The two small publications just referred to remained unnoticed by the reading public, and Lotze became first known to a larger circle through a series of works which had the object of establishing in the study of the physical and mental phenomena of the human organism in its normal and diseased states the same general principles which had been adopted in the investigation of inorganic phenomena. These works were his Allgemeine Pathologic und Therapie als mechanische Natunvusenschaften (Leipsic, 1842, 2d ed. 1848), the articles &quot; Lebenskraft &quot; (1843) and &quot; Seele und Seelenleben &quot; (1846) in Hud. Wagner s Handwortcrbuch der Physiologic, his Allgemeine Physiologic des Korperlicheu Lebens (Leipsic, 1851), and his Medizinische Psychologic odcr Physiologic der Seele (Leipsic, 1852). When Lotze came out with these works, medical science was still much under the influence of Schelling s philosophy of nature. The mechanical laws, to which external things were subject, were conceived as being valid only in the inorganic world ; in the organic and mental worlds these mechanical laws were conceived as being disturbed or overridden by other powers, such as the influence of final causes, the existence of types, the work of vital and mental forces. Thi-* confusion Lotze, who had been trained in the school of mathematical reasoning, tried to dispel. The laws which govern particles of matter in the inorganic world govern them likewise if they are joined into an organism. A phenomenon a, if followed by b in the one case, is followed by the same b also in the other case. Final causes, vital and mental forces, the soul itself can, if they act at al), only act through the inexorable mechanism of natural laws. If a is to be followed by d and not by b, this can only be effected by the additional existence of a third something c, which again by purely mechanical laws would change b into d. As we therefore have only to do with the study of existing complexes of material and spiritual phenomena, the changes in these must be explained in science by the rule of mechanical laws, such as obtain everywhere in the world and only by such. One of the results of these