A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze (Volume 54; V. 427); The Doctrine of Thought (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1895. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... 268 CHAPTER VII THE SUBJECTIVE WORLD OF IDEAS AND THE SUBJECTIVE PROCESSES OF THOUGHT OTZE ends both the first and the third book of his Logic with a sympathetic reference to Idealism. In the former he admits that in the Speculative form of thought, "if we could give that form to the whole material of thought, our mind would find all its demands satisfied;"1 and in the latter he says, "I will at least close with the avowal that I hold that much reviled ideal of speculative intuition to be the supreme and not wholly unattainable goal of science."2 His quarrel is not with the idealistic view of the ideal of knowledge, but with the doctrine that the ideal is attainable by thought. He does not so much desire to establish another view of the world, as to prove that the truth is attainable by other means than those of the discursive understanding -with which he identifies thought. We have seen what extreme difficulties meet him in the attempt to confine thought to the formal activity of combining externally given contents: how formal thought, at each step ol advancing knowledge, showed itself more and more inadequate to the demands that were made upon it; how the apparent transitions from one form to another, from Conception to Judgment, from Judgment to Reasoning--nay, from each of the subsidiary forms of these latter to the higher one--proved to be unintelligible, the higher being only apparently higher than the preceding form; we have seen, in other words, how thought lapses back, in Lotze's hands, into mere tautology, each of the forms of reasoning, judgment, and conception failing in turn to break its fall. But none of these difficulties roused Lotze to reconsider his fundamental presupposition that thought is a formal, combining function. On the contrar...