ted, and each new step forward will only lead to new views, to
new secrets, to new wonders.

But does not a development, like that which we here for the moment assume
hypothetically, efface and destroy the specific value of man and mankind
from still another side? Would not a _beginning_ of mankind be really lost,
in case that theory of evolution should gain authority? and would not there
still lie between that which is decidedly called animal world and that
which is decidedly called mankind an innumerable series of generations of
beings which were neither animal nor man? We do not believe it. What makes
man _man_, {270} we can exactly point out: it is self-consciousness and
moral self-determination. Now, in case development took place in the above
sense, it may have passed ever so gradually; the epochs of preparation
between that which we know as highest animal development and that which
constitutes the substance of man, may have stretched over ever so many
generations, and, if the friends of evolution desire it, we say over ever
so many thousands of generations; yet that which makes man
_man_--self-consciousness and moral self-determination--must have always
come into actual reality in _individuals_. Those individuals in which
self-consciousness came into existence and activity, for the first time,
and with it the entire possibility of the world of ideas--the consciousness
of moral responsibility, and with it also the entire dignity of moral
self-determination--were the first men. The individuals which preceded the
latter may have been ever so interesting and promising as objects of
observation, if we imagine ourselves spectators of these once supposed
processes; yet, they were not men.

Sec. 4. _The Selection Theory and Theism._

The last scientific theory whose position in reference to theism we have to
discuss, is the selection theory.

We have found but little reason for sympathizing with this theory. But
since we believed that we were obliged to suspect it, not for religious but
for scientific reasons, so the completeness of our investigation requires
us to assume hypothetically that the selection principle really manifests
itself as the only and exclusive principle of the origin of species, and to
ask now what position it would in such a case take in reference to theism.
{271}

The only answer we are able to give is decidedly favorable to theism.

It is true, development would in such a case approach the or