[Footnote 1:  Outlines of Psychology, Practical Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Nature, Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Metaphysics, Aesthetics, and the History of Philosophy since Kant, all of which may be emphatically commended to students, especially the one first mentioned, and, in spite of its subjective position, the last. [English translations of these Outlines except the fourth and the last, by Ladd, 1884 seq.] On Lotze cf. the obituaries by J. Baumann (Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xvii.), H. Sommer (Im Neuen Reich), A. Krohn (Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie, vol. lxxxi. pp. 56-93), R. Falckenberg (Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, 1881, No. 233), and Rehnisch (National Zeitung and the Revue Philosophique, vol. xii.).  The last of these was reprinted in the appendix to the Grundzuege der Aesthetik, 1884, which contains, further, a chronological 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