conception, the statical doctrine is developed in a brilliant and
informing manner. Yet it is in the detail of his logical investigations,
something too volatile to fix in summary, that Lotze's greatness as a
logician more especially lies.
With Lotze the ideal that at last the forms of thought shall be realized
to be adequate to that which at any stage of actual knowledge always
proves relatively intractable is an illuminating projection of faith. He
takes courage from the reflection that to accept scepticism is to
presume the competence of the thought that accepts. He will, however,
take no easy way of parallelism. Our human thought pursues devious and
circuitous methods. Its forms are not unseldom scaffolding for the house
of knowledge rather than the framework of the house itself. Our task is
not to realise correspondence with something other than thought, but to
make explicit those justificatory notions which condition the form of
our apprehension. "However much we may presuppose an original reference
of the forms of thought to that nature of things which is the goal of
knowledge, we must be prepared to find in them many elements which do
not directly reproduce the actual reality to the knowledge of which they
are to lead us."[139] The impulse of thought to reduce coincidence to
coherence reaches immediately only to objectivity or validity. The sense
in which the presupposition of a further reference is to be interpreted
and in which justificatory notions for it can be adduced is only
determinable in a philosophic system as a whole, where feeling has a
place as well as thought, value equally with validity.
Lotze's logic then represents the statical aspect of the function of
thought in knowledge, while, so far as we go in knowledge thought is
always engaged in the unification of a manifold, which remains
contradistinguished from it, though not, of course, completely alien to
and unadapted to it. The further step to the determination of the ground
of harmony is not to be taken in logic, where limits are present and
untranscended.
Logic as Metaphysic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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