This conviction of the emptiness of terms and abstract notions, and of the fullness of individual life, led Lotze to combine in his writings the two courses into which German philosophical thought had been moving since the death of its great founder, Leibniz. We may define these courses by the terms esoteric and exoteric. The former was the academic quest to systematize everything and reduce all our knowledge to an intelligible principle. This attempt missed the deeper meaning of Leibniz's philosophy. The latter was the unsystematized philosophy of general culture which we find in the work of the great writers of the classical period, Lessing, Winckelmann, Goethe, Schiller and Herder. All of these expressed in some degree their indebtedness to Leibniz. Lotze can be said to have brought philosophy out of the lecture-room into the market-place of life. By understanding and combining the strengths of each approach, he became the true successor of Leibniz.