[33] _Philosophy of Lotze_, chap. iii, "Thought and the Preliminary
Process of Experience."
[34] I, 38.
[35] I, 13; last italics mine.
[36] I, 14; italics mine.
[37] See I, 16-20. On p. 22 this work is declared to be not only the
first but the most indispensable of all thought's operations.
[38] I, 26.
[39] I, 35.
[40] I, 36; see the strong statements already quoted, p. 112. What if
this canon were applied in the first act of thought referred to above:
the original objectification which transforms the mere state into an
abiding quality or meaning? Suppose, that is, it were said that the
first objectifying act cannot make a substantial (or attached) quale
out of a mere state of feeling; it must _find_ the distinction it
makes there already! It is clear we should at once get a _regressus ad
infinitum_. We here find Lotze face to face with this fundamental
dilemma: thought either arbitrarily forces in its own distinctions, or
else just repeats what is already there--is either falsifying or
futile. This same contradiction, so far as it affects the impression,
has already been discussed. See p. 114.
[41] I, 31.
[42] As we have already seen, the concept, the meaning as such, is
always a factor or status in a reflective situation; it is always a
predicate of judgment, in use in interpreting and developing the
logical subject, or datum of perception.
[43] Royce, in his _World and Individual_, I, chaps. vi and vii, has
criticized the conception of meaning as valid, but in a way which
implies that there is a difference between validity and reality, in
the sense that the meaning or content of the valid idea becomes real
only when it is experienced in direct _feeling_. The foregoing
implies, of course, a difference between validity and reality, but
finds the test of validity in exercise of the function of direction or
control to which the idea makes pretension or claim. The same point of
view would profoundly modify Royce's interpretation of what he terms
"inner" and "outer" meaning. See Moore, _University of Chicago
Decennial Publications_, III, on "Existence, Meaning, and Reality."
[44] II, 257, 265, and in general Book III, chap. iv. It is
significant that thought itself, appearing as an act of thinking over
against its own content, is here treated as psychical rather than as
logical. Consequently, as we see in the text, it gives him one more
difficulty to wrestle with: how a process which is ex officio purely
psychical and subjective can yet yield results which are valid in a
logical, to say nothing of an ontological, sense.
[45] Lotze even goes so far in this connection as to say that the
antithesis between our ideas and the objects to which they are
directed is itself a part of the world of ideas (II, 192). Barring the
phrase "world of _ideas_" (as against world of continuous experience),
he need only have commenced at this point to have traveled straight
and arrived somewhere. But it is absolutely impossible to hold both
this view and that of the original independent existence of something
given to and in thought and an independent existence of a
thought-activity, thought-forms, and thought-contents.