into new and
full light. Therefore, if we wish to reach a certain basis for our
conviction, nothing else remains to us but to enter upon that question
wholly and exclusively from Darwinian premises.

Now these premises, indeed, indicate to us a _development_ of things, but a
development of such a kind that there appears to us something new, and
always new in a rising line. The rising of this line of development
consists in the fact that the spiritual comes forth from the {328} natural
in permanent progress and in always higher development: that mind
vanquishes matter. The first new thing which meets us in the development of
the globe, is the organic and life; the second, sensation and
consciousness; the third, self-consciousness and free-will. Now let us once
suppose imaginary human spectators of every first appearance of these
phenomena. Would he who thus far had only known inorganic phenomena and
processes, have dared, before the appearance of life, to utter the
proposition: matter can also become living and live? And who would have
dared to suggest the further doctrine: matter can also feel and get a
consciousness of things? Finally, who would have dared even to say: matter
can also become a self-conscious and free personality? To every person who
would have pronounced such dreams of the future, there would have been
opposed, apparently with full right, the inviolable mechanism of the
inorganic world. But all this nevertheless took place. If something
material can be led so far that a personality lives in it, that, with the
assistance of this material basis, is able to perceive the ideas and the
eternal, that can act in accordance with aims and designs and can set
itself the highest aims, and that may even enter upon a loving and
child-like relation to the highest primitive cause of all things, then we
are no longer permitted to say that the material, of which the body of such
a personality consists, could not have been subjected to the service of
such a personality so far, that the latter could have vanquished the
elements of the destruction of life in an eternal process of spontaneous
renewal.

It is true, with such a concession alone we have not {329} gained anything
directly. For _in abstracto_ everything is finally conceivable which does
not contradict the logical laws of reasoning--even the basilisk and the
mountain of diamonds in stories and fairy tales. But such an _abstract_
conceivableness has not the leas