lex mechanisms. And on
the other hand they bring down will soul and instincts into the lowest
stages of existence, and become quite animistic. They wish to be nothing
if not "exact," and yet they reckon Goethe and Bruno among the greatest
apostles of their faith, and set their verses and sayings as a _credo_ and
motto over their own opinions. In this way there arises a "world
conception" so indiarubber-like and Protean that it is as difficult as it
is unsatisfactory to attempt to come to an understanding with it. If we
attempt to get hold of it by the fringe of poetry and idealism it has
assumed, it promptly retires into its "exact" half. And if we try to limit
ourselves to this, in order to find a basis for discussion, it spreads out
before us all the splendours of a great nature pantheism, including even
the ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful. One thing only it
neglects, and that is, to show where its two very different halves meet,
and what inner bond unites them. Thus if we are to discuss it at all, we
must first of all pick out and arrange all the foreign and mutually
contradictory constituents it has incorporated, then deal with Pantheism
and Animism, and with the problem of the possibility of "the true, the
good, the beautiful" on the naturalistic-empiric basis, and finally there
would remain a readily-grasped residue of naturalism of the second form,
to come to some understanding with which is both necessary and
instructive.

In the following pages we shall confine ourselves entirely to this type,
and we shall not laboriously disentangle it from the bewildering medley of
ideas foreign to it, or attempt to make it consistent; we shall neglect
these, and have regard solely to its clear fundamental principles and
aims. Thus regarded, its horizons are perfectly well-defined. It is
startling in its absolute poverty of ideal content, warmth, and charm, but
impressive and grand in the perseverance and tenacity with which it
adheres to one main point of view throughout. In reality, it is aggressive
to nothing, but cold and indifferent to everything, and for this very
reason is more dangerous than all the excited protests and verdicts of the
enthusiastic type of naturalism, which it is impossible to attack, because
of its lack of definite principles, and which, in the pathetic stress it
lays on worshipping nature, lives only by what it has previously borrowed
from the religious conceptions of the world.