"Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality; and, the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real," are Bradley's closing words.
As for Balfour, he leads his readers up to a point which he describes as "the threshold of Christian Theology." And having propounded the perplexities in which the "common sense" philosophy (on which naturalism depends) is involved, he says:
"I do not believe that any escape from them (the perplexities) is possible, unless we are prepared to bring to the study of the world the presupposition that it was the work of a rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same time made us, in however feeble a fashion, able to understand it."[50]
Revival of Idealism in Germany. Lotze.—We have perhaps dwelt at too great length upon the backwash of the idealistic wave in England, for idealism is not a native philosophy amongst us; possibly, because we are not metaphysically-minded in the same sense as are the purer Teutonic breed. And it is time to pass on to pay a brief tribute to the work of a German philosopher who accepted the mechanical theory in its totality, without sacrificing what we may call the spiritual values of existence.
Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) was inclined to feel that the weakness of Romanticism lay in a tendency to despise or overlook what Kant had called "the fertile bathos of experience." The Romanticists had too often neglected natural science, which, in the shape of naturalistic materialism, had its revenge by destroying them. Büchner was the Nemesis of an idealism which was at once vague and sentimental.
Lotze's "Microcosmos."—Lotze's attitude and method are conspicuous in his well-known work, which took him eight years to complete (1856-1864)—the Microcosmos. After guiding his readers "through the realms of natural phenomena and historical evolution," thus constructing a sufficiently stable basis out of facts—he leads them on to an ideal world composed of what he calls "values."
His position may thus be summarised: The world presents itself to the observer in three aspects—(1) The world of individual "things," which are bewildering and intricate; (2) the laws (i.e., "laws of nature") which the human intellect has discovered among them, thus finding regularity and order; (3) the "values" which the human soul applies to things, and which it is the human task to cultivate.
This world of ideals or values (3) is that for the sake of which the worlds of phenomena and law (1 and 2) exist. These (1 and 2) constitute respectively the material in which, and the forms through which, the world of "values" is to be realised.[51]
Thus phenomena and law are the raw material out of which "values" are created; and these "values" themselves constitute (in the eyes of Lotze) a higher reality. Thus the central doctrine of his system is that the truly Real is what has supreme worth: it is worth that creates reality. The paradoxicality of this may make it difficult to accept; but Lotze is only expressing in his own way the fundamental thesis of all forms of idealism, that "the ideal is the real"; that the world of phenomena is secondary to and dependent upon a "world of spirit," or an "ideal world."
Lotze himself in the introduction to the Microcosmos, expresses what is at once the foundation and the kernel of his system: he says it is his purpose to show "how absolutely universal is the extent, and at the same time how completely subordinate the significance, of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world." (E.T., p. xvi.)