which leads to a
development of the species, or as being before present in the organisms,
but still latent, and only coming into activity when they are set free. But
the question whether theism could accept the one or the other possibility
had to be treated of in the preceding section, and was there answered in
the affirmative.

Thus it only remains to treat in general of the question as to the
reconcilableness of the idea of the origin of species through evolution,
through gradual development, _in general_ with a theistic view of the
world.

In the first place, we wish to render evident the fact which is so often
overlooked by the friends of monism and still more by theistic adversaries
of the idea of evolution, that the idea of a development of species, and
also of man, does not offer to theistic reasoning any new or any other
difficulties than those which have been long present, and which had found
their solution in the religious consciousness long before any idea of
evolution disturbed the {266} mind. It is true, the question as to the
origin of _mankind_ is, to speak in the language of natural history, a
still unsolved _problem_; and the supposition of its gradual development
out of the animal kingdom is still an _hypothesis_--one of all those
attempts at solving this problem which still wait for confirmation or
refutation. But there is another quite analogous question whose position
has long ceased to be a mere problem, and whose solution is no longer a
mere hypothesis; namely, the question as to the origin of the perfect human
or any other organic _individual_. To speak again in the language of
natural history, this origin is no longer a problem--that is, without
regard to the obscurity in which the existence and origin of every
creature, as to its last causes, is always and will always be veiled for
us. We know that the human, and, in general, every organic individual,
becomes that which it is through _development_. It begins the course of its
being with the existence of a single cell, the egg, and goes through all
stages of this development by wholly gradual and imperceptible transitions,
so that the precise moment cannot exactly be fixed when any organ, any
physical or psychical function, comes into existence, until perfect man is
_developed_. Man has this mode of coming into existence in common with all
organized beings, down to the lowest organisms which stand above the value
and rank of a single cell. At t