The ideality of space, which Kant had based on insufficient grounds, is maintained by Lotze also, only that he makes things stand in “intellectual” relations, which the knowing subject translates into spatial language.  The same character of subjectivity 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.