of Lotze's treatment may, however, lead us to believe that his statement is riddled through and through with inconsistencies and self-contradictions; that, indeed, any one part of it can be maintained only by the denial of some other portion.
1. The impression is the ultimate antecedent in its purest or crudest form (according to the angle from which one views it). It is that which has never felt, for good or for bad, the influence of thought. Combined into ideas, these impressions stimulate or arouse the activities of thought, which are forthwith directed upon them. As the recipient of the activity which they have excited and brought to bear upon themselves, they furnish also the material content of thought—its actual stuff. As Lotze says over and over again: "It is the relations themselves already subsisting between impressions, when we become conscious of them, by which the action of thought which is never anything but reaction, is attracted; and this action consists merely in interpreting relations which we find existing between our passive impressions into aspects of the matter of impressions."[7] And again:[8] "Thought can make no difference where it finds none already in the matter of the impressions." And again:[9] "The possibility and the success of thought's procedure depends upon this original constitution and organization of the whole world of ideas, a constitution which, though not necessary in thought, is all the more necessary to make thinking possible."
The impressions and ideas play a versatile rôle; they now assume the part of ultimate antecedents and provocative conditions; of crude material; and somehow, when arranged, of content for thought. This very versatility awakens suspicion.
While the impression is merely subjective and a bare state of our own consciousness, yet it is determined, both as to its existence and as to its relation to other similar existences, by external objects as stimuli, if not as causes. It is also determined by a psychical mechanism so thoroughly objective or regular in its workings as to give the same necessary character to the current of ideas that is possessed by any physical sequence. Thus that which is "nothing but a state of our consciousness" turns out straightway to be a specifically determined objective fact in a system of facts.
That this absolute transformation is a contradiction is no clearer than that just such a contradiction is indispensable to Lotze. If the impressions were nothing but states of consciousness, moods of ourselves, bare psychical existences, it is sure enough that we should never even know them to be such, to say nothing of conserving them as adequate conditions and material for thought. It is only by treating them as real facts in a real world, and only by carrying over into them, in some assumed and unexplained way, the capacity of representing the cosmic facts which arouse them, that impressions or ideas come in any sense within the scope of thought. But if the antecedents are really impressions-in-their-objective-setting, then Lotze's whole way of distinguishing thought-worth from mere existence or event without objective significance must be radically modified.
The implication that impressions have actually a matter or quality or meaning of their own becomes explicit when we refer to Lotze's theory that the immediate antecedent of thought is found in the matter of ideas. When thought is said to "take cognizance of relations which its own activity does not originate, but which have been prepared for it by the unconscious mechanism of the psychic states,"[10] the attribution of objective content, of reference and meaning to ideas, is unambiguous. The idea forms a most convenient half-way house for Lotze. On one hand, as absolutely prior to thought, as material antecedent condition, it is merely psychical, a bald subjective event. But as subject-matter for thought, as antecedent which affords stuff for thought's exercise, it is meaning, characteristic quality of content.
Although we have been told that the impression is a mere receptive irritation without participation of mental activity, we are not surprised, in view of this capacity of ideas, to learn that the mind actually has a determining share in both the reception of stimuli and in their further associative combinations. The subject always enters into the presentation of any mental object, even the sensational, to say nothing of the perceptional and the imaged. The perception of a given state of things is possible only on the assumption that "the perceiving subject is at once enabled and compelled by its own nature to combine the excitations which reach it from objects into those forms which it is to perceive in the objects, and which it supposes itself simply to receive from them."[11]
It is only by continual transition from impression and ideas as mental states and events to ideas as cognitive (or logical) objects or contents, that Lotze bridges the gulf from bare exciting antecedent to concrete material conditions of thought. This contradiction, again, is necessary to Lotze's standpoint. To set out frankly with "meanings" as antecedents would demand reconsideration of the whole view-point, which supposes that the difference between the logical and its antecedent is a matter of the difference between worth and mere existence or occurrence. It would indicate that since meaning or value is already there, the task of thought must be that of the transformation or reconstruction of worth through an intermediary process of valuation. On the other hand, to stick by the standpoint of mere existence is not to get anything which can be called even antecedent of thought.
2. Why is there a task of transformation? Consideration of the material in its function of evoking thought, giving it its cue, will serve to complete the picture of the contradiction and of the real facts. It is the conflict between ideas as merely coincident and ideas as coherent that constitutes the need which provokes the response of thought. Here Lotze vibrates (a) between considering coincidence and coherence as both affairs of existence of psychical events; (b) considering coincidence as purely psychical and coherence as at least quasi-logical, and (c) the inherent logic which makes them both determinations within the sphere of reflective thought. In strict accordance with his own premises, coincidence and coherence both ought to be mere peculiarities of the current of ideas as events within ourselves. But so taken the distinction becomes absolutely meaningless. Events do not cohere; at the most certain sets of them happen more or less frequently than other sets; the only intelligible difference is one of repetition of coincidence. And even this attributes to an event the supernatural trait of reappearing after it has disappeared. Even coincidence has to be defined in terms of relation of the objects which are supposed to excite the psychical events that happen together.
As recent psychological discussion has made clear enough, it is the matter, meaning, or content, of ideas that is associated, not the ideas as states or existences. Take such an idea as sun-revolving-about-earth. We may say it means the conjunction of various sense-impressions, but it is conjunction, or mutual reference, of attributes that we have in mind in the assertion. It is absolutely certain that our psychical image of the sun is not psychically engaged in revolving about our psychical image of the earth. It would be amusing if such were the case; theaters and all dramatic representations would be at a discount. In truth, sun-revolving-about-earth is a single meaning or idea; it is a unified subject-matter within which certain distinctions of reference appear. It is concerned with what we intend when we think earth and sun, and think them in their relation to each other. It is really a specification or direction of how to think when we have occasion to think a certain subject-matter. To treat the origin of this mutual reference as if it were simply a case of conjunction of ideas produced by conditions of original psycho-physical irritation and association is a profound case of the psychological fallacy. We may, indeed, analyze an experience and find that it had its origin in certain conditions of the sensitive organism, in certain peculiarities of perception and of association, and hence conclude that the belief involved in it was not justified by the facts themselves. But the significance of the belief in sun-revolving-about-earth as an item of the experience of those who meant it, consisted precisely in the fact that it was taken not as a mere association of feelings, but as a definite portion of the whole structure of objective experience, guaranteed by other parts of the fabric, and lending its support and giving its tone to them. It was to them part of the experience-frame of things—of the real universe.
Put the other way, if such an instance meant a mere conjunction of psychical states, there
