This influence, in the case both of Schopenhauer and Lotze, rests, aside from the fact of the universal character of their thought-creations, already referred to, pre-eminently in the circumstance that both made thoroughly their own the scientific theory of things and recognised that conception as one whose justification was contained in itself, and which, regarded from the standpoint of its own hypotheses, was irrefutable, though they were nevertheless far removed from perceiving in it the final and irreversible verdict of human knowledge. In this endeavor to fix the limits of scientific cognition Schopenhauer and Lotze form important pillars of the antimaterialistic movement in Germany, and are just in this respect also intimately related with the task of the modern Critical Philosophy or Neo-Kantianism. But while the latter movements came to a stop with predominantly negative or preparatory criticism, Schopenhauer and Lotze owe a great portion of their wide-spread influence on German culture to the circumstance that they undertook, from the point of view of the critical theory of knowledge already acquired, to sketch the plans of structures of the world which would furnish a general background and scheme of synthetic connection for the collective special results of the physical and mental sciences. That these sketches of world-construction have an individual coloring can only lessen their value in the eyes of those who believe they are privileged to apply to such a synthetic, constructive formulation of the highest ideas of all existence and thought, the standard of the exact determination of a single law. And so I shall only hastily point to the fact, that the contrariety and oppositeness that permeates the world and all our thought about the world also comes sharply to light in the case of these two philosophers, not to their mutual destruction, but to the heightenment of the effect by the contrast.