The implication that impressions have actually a quality or meaning of their own becomes explicit when we refer to Lotze's theory that the immediate antecedent of thought is found in the _matter_ of ideas. When thought is said to "take cognizance of _relations_ which its own activity does not originate, but which have been prepared for it by the unconscious mechanism of the psychic states,"[18] the attribution of objective content, of reference and meaning to ideas, is unambiguous. The idea forms a most convenient halfway house for Lotze. On one hand, as absolutely prior to thought, as material antecedent condition, it is merely psychical, bald subjective event. But as subject-matter for thought, as antecedent which affords stuff for thought's exercise, it characteristically qualifies content. Although we have been told that the impression is a mere receptive irritation without participation of mental activity, we are not surprised, in view of this capacity of ideas, to learn that the mind actually has a determining share in both the reception of stimuli and in their further associative combinations. The subject always enters into the presentation of any mental object, even the sensational, to say nothing of the perceptional and the imaged. The perception of a given state of things is possible only on the assumption that "the perceiving subject is at once enabled and compelled by its own nature to combine the excitations which reach it from objects into those forms which it is to perceive in the objects, and which it supposes itself simply to _receive_ from them."[19] It is only by continual transition from impression and ideas as mental states and events to ideas as logical _objects or contents_, that Lotze bridges the gulf from bare exciting antecedent to concrete material conditions of thought. This contradiction, again, is necessary to Lotze's standpoint. To set out frankly with objects as antecedents would demand reconsideration of the whole viewpoint, which supposes that the difference between the logical and its antecedent is a matter of the difference between _worth_ and mere _existence_ or _occurrence_. It would indicate that since meaning or value is already there, the task of thought must be that of the transformation or _reconstruction of meaning_ through an intermediary process. On the other hand, to stick by the standpoint of _mere_ existence is not to get anything which can be called even antecedent of thought.