{130} into existence, must necessarily be explainable from agencies
previously active, and known to or imagined by us through abstractions and
hypotheses. Zoellner is certainly right when, in his work which appeared
before the lecture of DuBois-Reymond, he puts the alternative, "either to
renounce forever the conceivableness of the phenomena of sensation, or
hypothetically to add to the common qualities of matter one more, which
places the simplest and most elementary transactions of nature under a
process of sensation, legitimately connected with it;" as also when he says
(page 327): "We may regard the intensity of these sensations (of matter) as
little and unimportant as we wish; but the hypothesis of their existence
is, according to my conviction, a necessary condition, in order to
comprehend the really existing phenomena of sensation in nature." Only we
shall do well to choose the first alternative for the present, and, with
DuBois-Reymond, answer the question as to the explanation of the origin of
sensation with an "_ignoramus_"; indeed, we shall take a surer road with
his "_ignorabimus_" than by a plunge into that bottomless ocean of
hypotheses--in spite of the protest of Haeckel, who (Anthrop., page XXI)
sees that scientist who has the courage to admit the limits of our
knowledge, on account of this "_ignorabimus_", walking in the army of the
"black International", and "marshalled under the black flag of the
hierarchy," together with "spiritual servitude and falsehood, want of
reason and barbarism, superstition and retrogression", and fighting,
"spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress."
For a solution of the question which simply denies all sharply-marked
differences in the world, and explains {131} the new, which comes into
existence with sensation, by the assertion that this new element is not
new, but was already present, and that it exists everywhere, only we do not
see it everywhere,--such a solution seems to us not to be the true way to
interpret the problem of the sphinx. Even Ed. von Hartmann seems to
infringe the impartiality of the true observer, when, in his "Philosophy of
the Unconscious," he attributes sensation to plants. But when Zoellner says
(p. 326): "_All the labors of natural beings_ [and, as the connection
indicates, of all, even of inorganic natural beings] are determined by like
and dislike;" and when "Anonymus" attributes sensation to all atoms and to
all comp