[38] I, 26.
[39] I, 35.
[40] I, 36; see the strong statements already quoted, p. 112. What if this canon were applied in the first act of thought referred to above: the original objectification which transforms the mere state into an abiding quality or meaning? Suppose, that is, it were said that the first objectifying act cannot make a substantial (or attached) quale out of a mere state of feeling; it must find the distinction it makes there already! It is clear we should at once get a regressus ad infinitum. We here find Lotze face to face with this fundamental dilemma: thought either arbitrarily forces in its own distinctions, or else just repeats what is already there—is either falsifying or futile. This same contradiction, so far as it affects the impression, has already been discussed. See p. 114.
[41] I, 31.
[42] As we have already seen, the concept, the meaning as such, is always a factor or status in a reflective situation; it is always a predicate of judgment, in use in interpreting and developing the logical subject, or datum of perception.
[43] Royce, in his World and Individual, I, chaps. vi and vii, has criticized the conception of meaning as valid, but in a way which implies that there is a difference between validity and reality, in the sense that the meaning or content of the valid idea becomes real only when it is experienced in direct feeling. The foregoing implies, of course, a difference between validity and reality, but finds the test of validity in exercise of the function of direction or control to which the idea makes pretension or claim. The same point of view would profoundly modify Royce's interpretation of what he terms "inner" and "outer" meaning. See Moore, University of Chicago Decennial Publications, III, on "Existence, Meaning, and Reality."
[44] II, 257, 265, and in general Book III, chap. iv. It is significant that thought itself, appearing as an act of thinking over against its own content, is here treated as psychical rather than as logical. Consequently, as we see in the text, it gives him one more difficulty to wrestle with: how a process which is ex officio purely psychical and subjective can yet yield results which are valid in a logical, to say nothing of an ontological, sense.
[45] Lotze even goes so far in this connection as to say that the antithesis between our ideas and the objects to which they are directed is itself a part of the world of ideas (II, 192). Barring the phrase "world of ideas" (as against world of continuous experience), he need only have commenced at this point to have traveled straight and arrived somewhere. But it is absolutely impossible to hold both this view and that of the original independent existence of something given to and in thought and an independent existence of a thought-activity, thought-forms, and thought-contents.
[46] Logic, Book IV, chap. ii, § 2.
[47] Logic, Book II, chap. i, § 1. I have changed the order of the sentences quoted, and have omitted some phrases.