of German materialism was at its height,[1] these works of Lotze were counted among the opposition literature which destroyed the phantom of Hegelian wisdom and vindicated the independent and self-sufficing position of empirical philosophy. Even philosophers of the eminence of I. H. Fichte (the younger) did not escape this misinterpretation of Lotze's true meaning, though they had his _Metaphysik_ and _Logik_ to refer to, though he promised in his _Allgemeine Physiologie_ (1851) to enter in a subsequent work upon the "bounding province between aesthetics and physiology," and though in his _Medizinische Psychologie_ he had distinctly stated that his position was neither the idealism of Hegel nor the realism of Herbart, nor materialism, but that it was the conviction that the essence of everything is the part it plays in the realization of some idea which is in itself valuable, that the sense of an all-pervading mechanism is to be sought in this, that it denotes the ways and means by which the highest idea, which we may call the idea of the good, has voluntarily chosen to realize itself. The misinterpretations which he had suffered induced Lotze to publish a small pamphlet of a polemical character (_Streitschriften_, Leipzig, 1857), in which he corrected two mistakes. The opposition which he had made to Hegel's formalism had induced some to associate him with the materialistic school, others to count him among the followers of Herbart. Lotze publicly and formally denied that he belonged to the school of Herbart, though he admitted that historically the same doctrine which might be considered the forerunner of Herbart's teachings might lead to his own views, viz. the monadology of Leibnitz.