moved about by some indefinable external power, in the form of some predestination or inexorable fate. The things themselves which exist and their changing phases must stand in some internal connexion; they themselves must be active or passive, capable of doing or suffering. This would lead to the view of Leibnitz, that the world consists of monads, self-sufficient beings, leading an inner life. But this idea involves the further conception of Leibnitz, that of a pre-established harmony, by which the Creator has taken care to arrange the life of each monad, so that it agrees with that of all others. This conception, according to Lotze, is neither necessary nor thoroughly intelligible. Why not interpret at once and render intelligible the common conception originating in natural science, viz. that of a system of laws which governs the many things? But, in attempting to make this conception quite clear and thinkable, we are forced to represent the connexion of things as a universal substance, the essence of which we conceive as a system of laws which underlies everything and in its own self connects everything, but imperceptible, and known to us merely through the impressions it produces on us, which we call things. A final reflection then teaches us that the nature of this universal and all-pervading substance can only be imagined by us as something analogous to our own mental life, where alone we experience the unity of a substance (which we call self) preserved in the multitude of its (mental) states. It also becomes clear that only where such mental life really appears need we assign an independent existence, but that the purposes of everyday life as well as those of science are equally served if we deprive the material things outside of us of an independence, and assign to them merely a connected existence through the universal substance by the action of which alone they can appear to us.