The obviousness of this further contradiction is paralleled only by its inevitableness. Thought is in the air, is arbitrary and wild in dealing with meanings, unless it gets its start and cue from actual experience. Hence the necessity of insisting upon thought's activity as just recognizing the contents already given. But, on the other hand, prior to the work of thought there is to Lotze no content or meaning. It requires a work of thought to detach anything from the flux of sense-irritations and invest it with a meaning of its own. This dilemma is inevitable to any writer who declines to consider as correlative the nature of thought-activity and thought-content from the standpoint of their generating conditions in the movement of experience. Viewed from such a standpoint the principle of solution is clear enough. As we have already seen (p. 53), the internal dissension of an experience leads to detaching certain values previously absorptively integrated into the concrete experience as part of its own qualitative coloring; and to relegating them, for the time being, (pending integration into further immediate values of a reconstituted experience) into a world of bare meanings, a sphere qualified as ideal throughout. These meanings then become the tools of thought in interpreting the data, just as the sense-qualities which define the presented situation are the immediate object to thought. The two _as mutually referred_ are content. That is, the datum and the thought-mode or idea as connected are the object of thought. To reach this unification is thought's objective or goal. Exactly the same value is idea, as either tool or content, according as it is taken as instrumental or as accomplishment. Every successive cross-section of the thought-situation presents what may be taken for granted as the outcome of previous thinking, and consequently as the determinant of further reflective procedure. Taken as defining the point reached in the thought-function and serving as constituent unit of further thought, it is content. Lotze's instinct is sure in identifying and setting over against each other the material given to thought and the content which is thought's own "building-stone." His contradictions arise simply from the fact that his absolute, non-historic method does not permit him to interpret this joint identity and distinction in a working, and hence relative, sense.