se, and whom the poet of the
Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that
lives, from grass to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as
becoming. And in regard to this, religion can say of the whole world what
it says of man. For man, too, is not given as a finished product, either
as regards the genus or the individual, but as a rudiment, with his
destiny to work out, in historical becoming, by realising what is inherent
in him. We call this freedom. And an adumbration of such freedom, which is
the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the
nature of things. Many riddles and apparent contradictions could be fitted
in with this view of things: the unity of the world, and yet the
gradations; the relationship of all living creatures, the unity of all
psychical life, and yet the uniqueness of the rational spirit; causal
concatenation, yet guidance by means of the highest ideas and purposes;
the tentativeness, illogicalness, and ineffectiveness of nature,
unconsciously pressing forward along uncertain paths, yet the directness
and purposefulness of the main lines of evolution in general. This
God-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development
in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive
action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its
organ. Operating in crystals and plants purely as a formative impulse and
"entelechy," it awakes in the bodies of animals more and more as "soul."
Then it awakes fully in man, and in him, in an entirely new phase of real
free development, it builds itself up to spirit. It resembles a stream
whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are
soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the
personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since
they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the
purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality
in the creature. But it is only in human history that what was prepared
for in natural evolution is completed.

The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in
nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom,
but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world,
which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what
is inherent in it as eterna