 Most of these continued influences remain unacknowledged, even subterranean. And it is only possible to isolate a few of them here. Beginning with the most obvious, Lotze, via the British Idealists, enriched the concept of the Absolute in a number of interesting ways. This can be shown if we further investigate two key aspects of Lotze’s metaphysics: how his functionalist approach entails both, on the one hand, monism and, on the other, a sort of instrumentalism.