belongs not only to our sensations, but
also to our ideas concerning the connection of things. Representations are
results, not copies, of the external stimuli; cognition comes under the
general concept of the interaction of real elements, and depends, like
every effect, as much upon the nature of the being that experiences the
effect as upon the nature of the one which exerts it, or rather, more upon
the former than upon the latter. If, nevertheless, it claims objective
reality, truth must not be interpreted as the correspondence of thought and
its object (the cognitive image can never be like the thing itself), nor
the mission of cognition, made to consist in copying a world already
finished and closed apart from the realm of spirits, to which mental
representation is added as something accessory. Light and sound are not
therefore illusions because they are not true copies of the waves of ether
and of air from which they spring, but they are the end which nature has
sought to attain through these motions, an end, however, which it cannot
attain alone, but only by acting upon spiritual subjects; the beauty and
splendor of colors and tones are that which of right ought to be in the
world; without the new world of representations awakened in spirits by the
action of external stimuli, the world would lack its essential culmination.
The purpose of things is to be known, experienced, and enjoyed by spirits.
The truth of cognition consists in the fact that it opens up the meaning
and destination of the world. That which ought to be is the ground of that
which is; that which is exists in order to the realization of values in
it; the good is the only real. It is true that we are not permitted to
penetrate farther than to the general conviction that the Idea of the good
is the ground and end of the world; the question, how the world has arisen
from this supreme Idea as from the absolute and why just this world with
its determinate forms and laws has arisen, is unanswerable. We understand
the meaning of the play, but we do not see the machinery by which it is
produced at work behind the stage. In ethics Lotze emphasizes with Fechner
the inseparability of the good and pleasure: it is impossible to state in
what the worth or goodness of a good is to consist, if it be conceived out
of all relation to a spirit capable of finding enjoyment in it.

If Lotze's philosophy harmoniously combines Herbartian and Fichteo-Hegelian
elements, Ed