Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/629

 LOTZE. 607 we mean only the consistency with which it keeps within the closed series of forms a, a, a,, without ever going over into the series b, b,. The relations, however, in which things stand, cannot pass to and fro between things like threads or little spirits, but are states in things themselves, and the change of the former always implies a change in these inner states. To stand in relations means to exchange actions. In order to experience such effects from others and to exercise them upon others, things must neither be wholly incom- parable (as red, hard, sweet) and mutually indifferent, nor yet absolutely independent ; if the independence of in- dividual beings were complete the process of action would be entirely inconceivable. The difficulty in the con- cept of causality — how does being a come to produce in itself a different state a because another being b enters into the state /? ? — is removed only when we look on the things as modes, states, parts of a single comprehensive being, of an infinite, unconditioned substance, in so far as there is then only an action of the absolute on itself. Nevertheless the assumption that, in virtue of the unity and consistency of the absolute or of its impulse to self-preservation, state /? in being b follows state a in being a as an accommoda- tion or compensation follows a disturbance, is not a full explanation of the process of action, does not remove the difficulty as to how one state can give rise to another. Metaphysics is, in general, unable to show how reality is made, but only to remove certain contradictions which stand in the way of the conceivability of these notions. The so far empty concept of an absolute looks to the phi- losophy of religion for its content ; the conception of the Godhead as infinite personality (it is a person in a far higher sense than we) is first produced when we add to the onto- logical postulate of a comprehensive substance the ethical postulate of a supreme good or a universal world-Idea. By " thing" we understand the permanent unit-subject of changing states. But the fact of consciousness furnishes the only guaranty that the different states or, y5, y, are in reality states of one being, and not so many different things alternating with one another. Only a conscious being, which itself effects the distinction between itself