in all his
representations, but must confess that in regard to the just described view
of the world, he does not succeed in making it conceivable to himself in a
manner to be justified even from a relatively scientific standpoint; a want
for which, it is true, we have beforehand the explanatory cause in the
quotation from Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation," Vol. II, p. 332,
given above.

Perhaps it appears relatively conceivable, when it is asserted that the
observation of an order, a connection, a development, a plan, in the world,
leads to the perception of such a quality of the laws, primitive elements,
and forces of the world, that something like it _had to_ result from them;
but that it does not lead to the acknowledgment of a personal author of the
world. We call such a view relatively conceivable, not because we agree
with it--for we find a logic which, in {167} contemplating the universe,
starts from an intelligent author of the world, infinitely less surrounded
by difficulties than one contrary to it--but because the acknowledgment or
denial of a living God is in the last instance not the result of any
scientific investigation or logical chain of reasoning, but the moral act
of the morally and religiously inclined individual, and because, if the
individual has once refused the strongest factor of faith in God,--namely,
his self-testimony in the conscience,--it is no longer impossible for the
individual to ignore his other testimonies as such, or to declare them
deficient. Now we certainly can say that we see order and many results in
the world, which are conformable to the object in view, and in consequence
of this observation must admit that no imaginable quality of primitive
beginnings, elements, and forces of the world had caused this result, but
that this result must have already been in the plan. But there certainly
are imaginable, _in abstracto_, infinitely many possibilities of other
elements and primitive beginnings of the world,--perhaps of some whose
result would have been but an eternal chaos, or of others whose result
would have been but an eternal rigidness, or of still others whose result
would also have been a certain order and variety of phenomena and
processes, but less beautiful than that of the really existing world. Thus,
then, this world now exists as a _special chance_ of infinitely many
chances; and who knows whether, in the course of thousands of millions of
terrestrial years in the