This contradiction has been worked out in accurate and complete detail
by Professor Jones.[33] He summarizes it as follows (p. 99): "No other
way was left to him [Lotze] excepting this of first attributing all
to sense and afterwards attributing all to thought, and, finally, of
attributing it to thought only because it was already in its material.
This _seesaw_ is essential to his theory; the elements of knowledge as
he describes them can subsist only by the alternate robbery of each
other." We have already seen how strenuously Lotze insists upon the
fact that the given subject-matter of thought is to be regarded wholly
as the work of a physical mechanism, "without any action of
thought."[34] But Lotze also states that if the products of the
psychical mechanism "are to admit of combination in the definite form
of a _thought_, they each require some previous shaping to make them
into logical building-stones and to convert them from _impressions_
into _ideas_. Nothing is really more familiar to us than this first
operation of thought; the only reason why we usually overlook it is
that in the language which we inherit, it is already carried out, and
it seems, therefore, to belong to the self-evident presuppositions of
thought, _not to its own specific work_."[35] And again (I, 23),
judgments "can consist of nothing but combinations of ideas which are
no longer mere impressions: every such idea must have undergone at
least the simple formation mentioned above." Such ideas are, Lotze
goes on to urge, already rudimentary concepts--that is to say, logical
determinations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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