Lotze

Lotze, RUDOLF HERMANN, philosopher, was born at Bautzen in Saxony, on 21st May 1817, studied both medicine and philosophy at Leipzig, was appointed professor of the latter subject at the same university in 1842 and at Göttingen in 1844; in 1881 he moved to Berlin, but died on 1st July of that year. It was as a physiologist that he first attracted notice by his articles contributed to Wagner's Handwörterbuch der Physiologie. In these he combatted the now exploded doctrine of vitalism or a specific 'Lebens- kraft,' and argued for a thorough-going mechanical treatment of the phenomena of life. The same views were expressed in his General Physiology of Bodily Life (1851), and led many to rank him with the materialistic thinkers of the day, though his real philosophical position, to which he remained constant through life, had been already expressed in his Metaphysik, published in 1841. The most comprehensive statement of his views on nature and man is contained in his Microcosmus, published in 3 vols. in 1856-64 (4th ed. 1885; Eng. trans. 2 vols. 1886). By this book, which he calls 'an attempt at an anthropology,' and in which he invokes the example of Herder, he is most widely known. Its attractive style and the semi-popular character of some of its disquisitions have contributed to make it read beyond the schools. A more systematic presentation of his thought on which he was at work towards the close of his life was cut short by death. Only two of the three promised volumes appeared, the first on Logic (1874; 2d ed. 1880; Eng. trans. 1884), and the second on Metaphysics (1879; 2d ed. 1884; Eng. trans. 1884). In addition to the works named, his Medicinische Psychologie (1852) and his Geschichte der Ästhetik in Deutschland (1868) deserve mention. The paragraphic summaries of his lectures which he was wont to dictate to his students, published in a series of small volumes since his death, afford a useful prospectus of his views. Their publication and translation into English may be taken as a sign of the important influence which Lotze had of late come to exercise upon contemporary thought. Philosophically, Lotze comes of the lineage of Leibnitz and Herbart; he starts, that is to say, from the standpoint of individualism or monadism. But he has also been powerfully influenced by Hegel and the German idealists, and he rounds off his individualism with the doctrine of one infinite real Being, within which individuals act and live. He considers this the only supposition which can explain the action of individual things upon one another. Lotze carries on, however, a constant polemic against what he considers the exclusively intellectual and abstract character of Hegelianism, and his own philosophy may be treated as in great part a justification and reassertion of feeling—in other words, of the demands made by man's ethical, æsthetic, and religious instincts. His other polemic is against the so-called scientific philosophy of the age. While conceding to mechanism its fullest rights in the explanation of events, Lotze everywhere insists that mechanism gives only, as it were, the scaffolding of existence, and that the meaning of the universe can only be read in the light of the Highest Good. Mechanism must be regarded philosophically as the instrument of purpose. Lotze's doctrine is therefore a teleological idealism, largely based on ethical considerations. His distinction, however, is not that of a systematic thinker, and he combats the deductive tendency of his predecessors in German philosophy; his works offer us acute and suggestive reflections on the chief subjects of philosophical interest. See H. Jones, The Philosophy of Lotze (1895).