onological table of Lotze's works, essays,
and critiques, as well as of his lectures. Hugo Sommer has zealously
devoted himself to the popularization of the Lotzean system. Cf., further,
Fritz Koegel, _Lotzes Aesthetik_, Goettingen, 1886, and the article by
Koppelmann referred to above, p. 330.]

The subject of metaphysics is reality. Things which are, events which
happen, relations which exist, representative contents and truths which
are valid, are real. Events happening and relations existing presuppose
existing things as the subjects in and between which they happen and exist.
The being of things is neither their being perceived (for when we say that
a thing is we mean that it continues to be, even when we do not perceive
it), nor a pure, unrelated position, its position in general, but _to be is
to stand in relations_. Further, the _what_ or essence of the things which
enter into these relations cannot be conceived as passive quality, but
only abstractly, as a rule or a law which determines the connection and
succession of a series of qualities. The nature of water, for example, is
the unintuitable somewhat which contains the ground of the change of ice,
first into the liquid condition, and then into steam, when the temperature
increases, and conversely, of the possibility of changing steam back
into water and ice under opposite conditions. And when we speak of an
unchangeable identity of the thing with itself, as a result of which it
remains the same essence amid the change of its phenomena, we mean only the
consistency with which it keeps within the closed series of forms a1, a2,
a3, without ever going over into the series b1, b2. The relations, however,
in which things stand, cannot pass to and fro between things like threads
or little spirits, but are states in things themselves, and the change
of the former always implies a change in these inner states. To stand in
relations means to _exchange actions_. In order to experience such effects
from others and to exercise them upon others, things must neither be wholly
incomparable (as red, hard, sweet) and mutually indifferent, nor yet
absolutely independent; if the independence of individual beings were
complete the process of action would be entirely inconceivable. The
difficulty in the concept of causality--how does being _a_ come to produce
in itself a different state _a_ because another being _b_ enters into the
state [Greek: _b_]?--is removed only when we look