[25] It is interesting to see how explicitly Lotze is compelled
finally to differentiate two aspects in the antecedents of thoughts,
one of which is necessary in order that there may be anything to call
out thought (a lack, or problem); the other in order that when thought
is evoked it may find data at hand--that is, material in shape to
receive and respond to its exercise. "The manifold matter of ideas is
brought before us, not only in the _systematic order of its
qualitative relationships_, but in the rich _variety of local and
temporal combinations_.... The _combinations of heterogeneous ideas_
... form the _problems_, in connection with which the efforts of
thought to reduce coexistence to coherence will _subsequently_ be
made. The _homogeneous or similar_ ideas, on the other hand, give
occasion to separate, to connect, and to count their repetitions" (I,
33, 34; italics mine). Without the heterogeneous variety of the local
and temporal juxtapositions there would be nothing to excite thought.
Without the systematic arrangement of quality there would be nothing
to meet thought and reward it for its efforts. The homogeneity of
qualitative relationships, _in the pre-thought material_, gives the
tools or instruments by which thought is enabled successfully to
tackle the heterogeneity of collocations and conjunctions also found
in the same material! One would suppose that when Lotze reached this
point he might have been led to suspect that in his remarkable
adjustment of thought-stimuli, thought-material, and thought-tools to
one another, he must after all be dealing, not with something prior to
the thought-function, but with the necessary structures and tools of
the thought-situation.
[26] _Supra_, p. 113.
[27] For the identity of sensory experience with the point of greatest
strain and stress in conflicting or tensional experience, see "The
Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology," _Psychological Review_, III, 57.
[28] For the "accessory" character of thought, see Lotze, I, 7, 25-27,
61, etc.
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