Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/116

100 "In closing his earliest philosophical work, the Metaphysik of 1841, Lotze gave expression to the conviction that the true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics. After nearly forty years of philosophical activity, he reaffirmed this conviction in the closing words of the Metaphysik of 1879, the latest of his works published during his lifetime" (p. 1). The same thesis stands in the summary at the conclusion of the investigation: "The fundamental unity of these conceptions" (the good, reality, and truth) "is at once the starting point and the goal of his thought, and it is this alone which makes his philosophy in any true sense a system" (pp. 100-101). Between these extremes, Miss Moore devotes the body of her essay to a painstaking study of Lotze's works as a whole, in order by a rapid survey and discussion of his essential positions to show: first, the meaning which he ascribed to 'good,' 'reality,' 'truth,' 'worth,' 'value'; second, the dependence of the "derivative ethical ideals—unity, teleology, personality," upon these; third, the ultimate source of his doctrine of the world, of God, and of man in the fundamental ethical conception. Though she thus writes out of a complete acquaintance with the Lotzean philosophy as well as with the literature of the subject, and in sympathetic appreciation of the master's views, Miss Moore does not shrink from criticism of the system at those points in which she believes it to be defective, e.g., Lotze' s imperfect analysis of feeling in relation to values and his "hedonism" (pp. 20-34); his "doctrine of the spirituality of things" (pp. 51-55); his vacillating discussion of psychical mechanism (pp. 90-92); his incomplete and unsatisfactory views of the problem of evil, of freedom, and of immortality (pp. 95-100). On the other hand, by a more careful interpretation of Lotze's conclusions than is vouchsafed them by some of his critics, she blunts the point of some of her own objections, e.g., the equation of ideal feeling and "worth-appreciative reason" (pp. 33-34) in opposition to the criticism of Professor Jones in his Lotze's Doctrine of Thought; the contention that the Religionsphilosophie, § 33 "goes far to refute those who maintain that the transition from the metaphysical to the religious conception of the Infinite is arbitrary and abrupt" (p. 67, cf. also pp. 65, 73-76); the suggestion that Lotze' s doctrine of a future life is not conditional immortality in the usual acceptation of the term, since "no such idea was ever seriously considered by Lotze, and it is certainly opposed to the trend of his thought" (p. 99).

With the central idea of Miss Moore's monograph nearly all students of philosophy will find themselves in agreement; and very many will be grateful to her for the careful elaboration which she has given to it, no less than for her independent criticism and her constructive work. At the same time, the thesis argued is of a kind which it is difficult to maintain without forcing the note, and this danger has not been altogether escaped in the discussion before us. Lotze's metaphysics was, no doubt, rooted in his concern for the maintenance of æsthetic, ethical, and religious ideals in an age when the tendency of thought was to bring these ultimate values