usality back to its last
consequences and, as Spencer does, even derive consciousness and sensation
from that which is without sensation, and yet not necessarily proceed so
far as _negation_ of a living God, even if he persists in his refusal to
perceive in general the ultimate cause of things.

To meet those attempts, religion would have to take only two precautionary
measures on two closely related points; and in doing this it would indeed
make use of that before-mentioned right to defend freedom of {280}
investigation both in its own realm and in the border-territory.

One precaution would consist in the requirement of the acknowledgment that
even in that purely immanent mode of explanation the _idea of value is
fixed_, but that the value of the new appears only when the new itself
really comes into existence; that we therefore do not call, _e.g._, the
inorganic _living_, because according to that mode of explanation life
develops itself out of it; and that we do not ascribe to the animal the
value of man, because according to that mode of explanation it also
includes the causes of the development of man. Such a discrimination of
ideas is indeed a _scientific postulate_, as we have had occasion to show
at many points of our investigation; and we also complied with this
requirement long ago in that realm of knowledge which is related to these
questions as to the origin of things, but is more accessible and open to
us, namely, in the realm of the development of the individual. We have
spoken of this at length in Sec. 3. But in the interest of _religion_ also we
have to request that the _differences of value_ of things be retained, even
when man thinks he is able to explain their origin merely out of one
another. For without this, all things would finally merge simply into
existences of like value; man would stand in no other relation to God than
would any other creature, irrational or lifeless; and the quintessence of
religious life--the relation of mutual personal love between God and man,
the certainty of being a child of God--would be illusory when there should
no longer be a difference of value between man and animal, animal and
plant, plant and stone. {281}

Many a reader thinks, perhaps, that with this precaution we make a
restriction which is wholly a matter of course, and that nobody would think
of denying these differences of value. Haeckel, in his "Anthropogeny,"
repeatedly reproaches man with the "arrogant