Lotze on the one hand held the Hegelian "deduction" to be untenable, and
classed himself with those who in his own phrase "passed to the order of
the day," while on the other hand he definitely raised the question, how
an "object" could be brought into forms to which it was not in some
sense adapted. Accordingly, though he regards logic as formal, its forms
come into relation to objectivity in some sort even within the logical
field itself, while when taken in the setting of his system as a whole,
its formal character is not of a kind that ultimately excludes
psychological and metaphysical reference, at least speculatively. As a
logician Lotze stands among the masters. His _flair_ for the essentials
in his problem, his subtlety of analysis, his patient willingness to
return upon a difficulty from a fresh and still a fresh point of view,
and finally his fineness of judgment, make his logic[137] so essentially
logic of the present, and of its kind not soon to be superseded, that
nothing more than an indication of the historical significance of some
of its characteristic features need be attempted here.
In Lotze's pure logic it is the Herbartian element that tends to be
disconcerting. Logic is formal. Its unit, the logical concept, is a
manipulated product and the process of manipulation may be called
abstraction. Processes of the psychological mechanism lie below it. The
paradox of the theory of judgment is due to the ideal of identity, and
the way in which this is evaded by supplementation to produce a
non-judgmental identity, followed by translation of the introduced
accessories with conditions in the hypothetical judgment, is thoroughly
in Herbart's manner. The reduction of judgments is on lines already
familiar. Syllogism is no instrumental method by which we compose our
knowledge, but an ideal to the form of which it should be brought. It
is, as it were, a schedule to be filled in, and is connected with the
disjunctive judgment as a schematic setting forth of alternatives, not
with the hypothetical, and ultimately the apodictic judgment with their
suggestion that it is the real movement of thought that is subjected to
analysis. Yet the resultant impression left by the whole treatment is
not Herbartian. The concept is accounted for in Kantian terms. There is
no discontinuity between the pre-logical or sub-logical conversion of
impressions into "first universals" and the formation of the logical
concept. Abstraction proves to be synthesis with compensatory universal
marks in the place of the particular marks abstracted from. Synthesis as
the work of thought always supplies, beside the mere conjunction or
disjunction of ideas, a ground of their coherence or non-coherence. It
is evident that thought, even as dealt with in pure logic, has an
objectifying function. Its universals have objective validity, though
this does not involve direct real reference. The formal conception of
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