icance. Whoever does not possess his religion in this way
will agree with, and will be quite satisfied with the Lotzian standpoint.
But to any one who has experience of the most characteristic element in
religion, it will be obvious that there must be a vague but deep-rooted
antipathy between religion and the mathematical-mechanical conception of
things. Evidence of the truth of this is to be found in the instinctive
perceptions and valuations which mark even the naive expressions of the
religious consciousness.(75) For it is in full sympathy with a world which
is riddled with what is inconceivable and incommensurable, in full
sympathy with every evidence of the existence of such an element in the
world of nature and mind, and therefore with every proof that the merely
mechanical theory has its limits, that it does not suffice, and that its
very insufficiency is a proof that the world is and remains in its depths
mysterious. Now we have already said that the true sphere for such feeling
is not the outer court of nature, but within the realm of the emotional
life and of history, and, on the other hand, that even if the attempt to
trace life back to the simpler forces of nature were successful, we should
still be confronted with the riddle of the sphinx. But any one who would
say frankly what he felt would at once be obliged to admit that the
religious sense is very strongly stirred by the mystery of vital
phenomena, and that in losing this he would lose a domain very dear to
him. These sympathies and antipathies are in themselves sufficient to give
an interest to the question of the insufficiency of the mechanical view of
things.

For it is by no means the case that the mechanical theory, with its
premisses and principles, is the interpretation that best fits the facts,
and that most naturally arises out of a calm consideration of the animate
world. It is an artificial scheme, and astonishing energy has been
expended on the attempt to fit it to the actual world, that it may make
this orderly and translucent. It certainly yields this service so far, but
not without often becoming a kind of strait-jacket, and revealing itself
as an artificiality. In so far as the special problems of biology are
concerned, we shall afterwards follow our previous method of taking our
orientation from those specialists in the subject who, in reaction from
the one-sidedness of the mechanical doctrine, have founded the
"neo-vitalism" of to-day.