tile French
nature is so superior to our sober German one. It is all the more
important that we should not let ourselves be dazzled by these
seductive tricks, and particularly by adduced facts which bear upon
the most important and fundamental questions of human science, but
that we should extract the hard kernel from the savoury and fragrant
fruit. In the preface to my "Evolution of Man," and in the notes 22
and 23 of my Munich address, I have already incidentally alluded to
the chief weaknesses of the "Ignorabimus-speech;" but I must here
return somewhat more fully to the subject.

There are, as is well known, two problems which Du Bois-Reymond
propounds as the impassable boundary of human knowledge of nature;
limits which indeed the human mind is not only incapable of passing at
the present stage of its development, but which it never can be
capable of passing in any more advanced stage. The first problem is
the nature and connection of matter and force; the second is human
consciousness. Now, first of all, as has already been said in the
preface to the "Evolution of Man," we must raise a decided protest
against the air of infallibility with which Du Bois-Reymond pronounces
that these two problems are insoluble, not only at the present time
but to all futurity. The power of development inherent in science and
knowledge is hereby simply swept away with a word. Almost every great
and difficult problem of knowledge seems to most or all contemporary
thinkers insoluble, and every path to the solution of it seems closed,
till at last the bold genius appears whose clear sight detects the
right path which till then was hidden, and which leads to the required
knowledge. We need only call to mind our present doctrine of
evolution. The problem of creation--the question as to the origin of
animal and vegetable species--was universally looked upon as
transcendental and perfectly insoluble, till the genius of Lamarck
established the principles of the theory of descent in his admirable
"Philosophie Zoologique" in 1809. Nay, even then most--and among them
the most distinguished--biologists thought the problem of creation a
quite insoluble mystery, and Darwin was the first to solve it, fifty
years later, by his theory of selection in 1859. Hence we venture to
assert that there is no scientific problem of which we may dare to say
that the mind of man will never solve it even in the remotest future.
Well does Darwin say, in the introd