Nor did they stop short at negative criticism, but substituted (according to the idealistic tradition) a spiritual view of reality for the mechanistic materialism that had become so popular. _Appearance and Reality_ is a book of which the trend might seem too obscure, but it ends with a note that is definite enough: "Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality; and, the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real," are Bradley's closing words. As for Balfour, he leads his readers up to a point which he describes as "the threshold of Christian Theology." And having propounded the perplexities in which the "common sense" philosophy (on which naturalism depends) is involved, he says: "I do not believe that any escape from them (the perplexities) is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being, who made _it_ intelligible, and at the same time made _us_, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it."[50] REVIVAL OF IDEALISM IN GERMANY. LOTZE.--We have perhaps dwelt at too great length upon the backwash of the idealistic wave in England, for idealism is not a native philosophy amongst us; possibly, because we are not metaphysically-minded in the same sense as are the purer Teutonic breed. And it is time to pass on to pay a brief tribute to the work of a German philosopher who accepted the mechanical theory in its totality, without sacrificing what we may call the spiritual values of existence. Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) was inclined to feel that the weakness of Romanticism lay in a tendency to despise or overlook what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." The Romanticists had too often neglected natural science, which, in the shape of naturalistic materialism, had its revenge by destroying them. Buechner was the Nemesis of an idealism which was at once vague and sentimental. LOTZE'S "MICROCOSMOS."--Lotze's attitude and method are conspicuous in his well-known work, which took him eight years to complete (1856-1864)--the _Microcosmos_. After guiding his readers "through the realms of natural phenomena and historical evolution," thus constructing a sufficiently stable basis out of _facts_--he leads them on to an ideal world composed of what he calls "values." His position may thus be summarised: The world presents itself to the observer in three aspects--(1) The world of individual "things," which are bewildering and intricate; (2) the laws (i.e., "laws of nature") which the human intellect has discovered among them, thus finding regularity and order; (3) the "values" which the human soul applies to things, and which it is the human task to cultivate.