l have brought something
new and higher into the world. Besides, this precaution is also a postulate
of anthropologic science. For spiritual and ethical facts have at least the
same truth and reality as the material, and a still higher value, and can
therefore not permit any injury to their full recognition. But religion
also must require this acknowledgment. For if the specific _activity_ of
mind in man is endangered, we also lose his specific _value_, and thus get
into the before-mentioned dilemma; and if the moral responsibility of man
is endangered, the relation of man to God loses its ethical character. Of
the consequences in reference to morality, we shall have to speak
hereafter. {283}

Moreover, religion does not require this acknowledgment without a rich
compensation. For if that naturo-philosophic mode of explanation, whose
correctness we hypothetically assume in this present section, prove to be
right, and if the higher which comes anew into existence in the world, is
to have the full cause of its origin in the preceding lower, such an
admission, in accordance with the laws of logic, by which _causa aequat
effectum_, is only possible when we either similarly, as above, invalidate
all difference between higher and lower, all difference of value of
creatures, and contest the possibility that that which appears anew can
also follow new laws of existence and activity; or when, in the highest
cause of all final causes in the world, we see the full abundance of all
those possibilities present as real cause, which afterwards appear in
succession in the world. This highest cause, then, lodges in material
things the final causes of all which is to come, as still latent causes,
waiting to be set free; and such a highest cause as the fullness of all
that which is successively to be developed in the world, is offered to
science by religion itself in the idea of a living God. We say expressly,
that religion offers this idea to science, and not that science creates
this idea; for the acknowledgment of God, as we have before had occasion to
point out, is in the last instance not a result of science, but an ethical
action of mind,--although from this acknowledgment the brightest light
falls upon science and the whole series of its conclusions, and although
science owes to precisely this idea of God the highest points of view to
which it sees itself led and from which alone it is able to survey its
entire realm. {284}

Sec.