This at once suggests the subjective phase. The situation, the experience as such, is objective. There is an experience of the confused and conflicting tendencies. But just _what in particular_ is objective, just _what_ form the situation shall take as an organized harmonious whole, is unknown; that is the problem. It is the uncertainty as to the _what_ of the experience together with the certainty _that_ there is such an experience, that evokes the thought-function. Viewed from this standpoint of uncertainty, the situation as a whole is subjective. No particular content or reference can be asserted off-hand. Definite assertion is expressly reserved--it is to be the outcome of the procedure of reflective inquiry now undertaken. This holding off of contents from definitely asserted position, this viewing them as candidates for reform, is what we mean at this stage of the natural history of thought by the subjective. We have followed Lotze through his tortuous course of inconsistencies. It is better, perhaps, to run the risk of vain repetition, than that of leaving the impression that these are _mere_ self-contradictions. It is an idle task to expose contradictions save we realize them in relation to the fundamental assumption which breeds them. Lotze is bound to differentiate thought from its antecedents. He is intent to do this, however, through a preconception that marks off the thought-situation radically from its predecessor, through a difference that is complete, fixed, and absolute, or at large. It is a total contrast of thought as such to something else as such that he requires, not a contrast within experience of one phase of a process, one period of a rhythm, from others. This complete and rigid difference Lotze finds in the difference between an experience which is _mere existence_ or occurrence, and one which has to do with worth, truth, right relationship. Now things, objects, have already, implicitly at least, determinations of worth, of truth, reality, etc. The same is true of deeds, affections, etc., etc. Only states of feelings, bare impressions, etc., seem to fulfil the prerequisite of being given as existence, and yet without qualification as to worth, etc. Then the current of ideas offers itself, a ready-made stream of events, of existences, which can be characterized as wholly innocent of reflective determination, and as the natural predecessor of thought.