illustrate the error, referred to,
by an example which will also reveal its relationship to the other error of
which we shall have to speak immediately. It is certainly no evidence of an
especially intensive piety, if we build the conviction that God is the
Creator of man, among other things, on the obscurity in which for us the
origin of mankind is wrapped. For from this obscurity no other conclusion
can be drawn than increased proofs of the limitation of our knowledge; that
piety which traces those phenomena whose natural causes we know, just as
decidedly to the causality of God, is much more--we shall not say,
intensive, but correctly guided--than that piety which traces back those
whose natural causes are hidden to us. And, on the other hand, it is also
no evidence of especial religious coolness or indifference, when we pursue
with interest and the desire of success the attempts at bringing light into
the history of the origin of mankind. He who does the latter can, according
to his religious or {256} irreligious standpoint, just as easily connect
his interest with the hope of an enrichment of his knowledge of the ways
and works of God, as with the hope of a confirmation in his atheistic view
of the world. The reverence with which we stand before the action of God in
those works whose existence is in a higher degree a mystery to us than the
existence of others (for in reality everything is a mystery to us), is
perhaps a little differently modified from the reverence with which we
stand before the action of God in those of his works in the mode of whose
origin we are permitted to get a deeper glance; but each is reverence, and
we can get from both nutriment for our religious nature.

Those who favor the second error--namely, that the idea of creation
excludes the idea of secondary causes--overlook the facts that the idea of
the creation of the universe is essentially different from the idea of the
creation of the single elements of the universe, as, for instance, of the
earth, of the organisms, of man; that the idea of a creation without
secondary causes can only be applied to the origin of the universe in its
elements, forces, and laws, and that the first origin of the single
elements in the world--as of the single planets, organisms, man--not only
admits the action of secondary causes, but even requires and presupposes
the action of conditions. For all single species of beings which have
originated within the already