 African Americans had contributed mightily in the realm of art but little, to date, in thought or politics, for the obvious reasons. But Lotze provided a metaphysical basis for equalizing and explaining such contributions to human culture: as noted above, for Lotze, the human soul (or human consciousness) is equally cognition, emotion, and volition. Descartes was wrong: we are not just thinking things, but also feeling and willing things.