begins and continues!

With this gradual process of individual development which we have long
known, we have never found any difficulty in bringing two things into
harmony. First, we always judged the value of the single qualities of man
only in the proportion in which they were really present and came into
existence, and in such a way that we entirely followed the flowing
development of the individual. Therefore we looked upon the suckling, for
instance, not at all as a morally responsible individual; upon the child of
two years as more responsible, but to a far less degree than the child of
school-age, and the latter again to a less degree than the man; and thus we
have been long accustomed to reason, when looking upon all single qualities
of man. Second, we did not find any difficulty in bringing into perfect
harmony the idea of a gradual process of individual development and of the
dependence of the latter on a complex totality of natural causes: with the
idea of the absolute dependence on God, the Creator, of that which arose
through development. Every religiously reasoning man has always looked upon
himself as the child of his parents, gradually developed under the activity
of complex natural causes, as well as the creature of God, that owes the
existence of all its forces and parts of body and soul to God. Should it
then, be so difficult, or is it only {269} something new, to bring into
harmony, when looking upon the entire species and genus, that which we were
long ago able to bring into harmony when looking upon the individual--it
being presupposed that the investigation leads us to a development of the
entire species and genus similar to that of the individual development? Or
have we here again to ask, as in Sec. 1: is it more religious to make no
attempt at removing the veil which covers the natural process of the origin
of mankind, than to make it? It is true, the not knowing anything can,
under certain circumstances, create and increase the sensation of reverence
for the depth of divine power and wisdom; but a perception of the ways of
God is also certainly able to create the same. On that account, we need not
at all fear that by such an attempt and its eventual success we might get
into the shallows of superficiality, to which nothing seems any longer to
be hidden, only because it has no presentiment of the depths which are to
be sounded. There will always remain enough of the mysterious and the
uninvestiga