struggle for existence, it did not obtain its
existence among infinitely many possibilities of worlds through a natural
world-selection, and thus, by the result of its existence, fully legitimate
its conformity to {168} the end in view? With this deduction, we do not
make, as it may seem, an awkward attempt at rendering the whole standpoint
ridiculous by a wild phantasy; but we quote it from a celebrated and
otherwise very meritorious book, namely the "Geschichte des Materialismus"
("History of Materialism"), by the too early deceased Friedrich Albert
Lange. The reader will find it, in the second part, page 275, simply a
little shorter and, as it seems to us, less clear, but as the only "correct
teleology" which Lange professes. This whole view, like all world-theories
and cosmogonies of pantheism, naturalism, or atheism, and even like the
latest of Eduard von Hartmann, is to us but a proof that the rejection of
the reality of a living Creator and Lord of the world requires of its
advocates mysteries and mysticisms of atheism compared to which the
greatest difficulties of the Christian view of the world are but the merest
trifles.

Therefore, if that first and second step in the rejection of the highest
intelligence and omnipotence as the final cause of the world, are once
made, it is easy for us to comprehend still other supports which this view
of the world draws to itself. However large the number of things in the
world for whose existence we can give a reason, or of which we can show
that that, which preceded, aimed at their appearance, still the number of
those to which we can not ascribe aim and design is just as large. There
are even phenomena enough which in their main effects appear to us directly
irrational; as, for instance, those which operate destructively,--all the
tortures which animals inflict on one another, etc. Besides, we can also
find imperfections in the degree of the {169} conformity to the end in view
in all those phenomena which appear to us as properly planned; for
instance, the organic appears to us higher than the inorganic, and yet it
is in its existence not only dependent on the inorganic, but is often
destroyed prematurely by it. Of course, all these limits and barriers of
our teleological perception are abundantly used by all antagonists of a
teleological view of the world for the basis of their position.
Furthermore, the way and manner in which man fixes his ends and reaches
them, is ess