rveys and controls their texture in all its threads, but who himself
arranged, wove, and made it. Such a view is not only more satisfactory to
the religious need of man, but it also seems to us more scientific, than a
view which traces everything back to a blind and dead cause, or even to no
ultimate cause at all, and thinks it has entirely removed the last veil, if
it pronounces the great word "causal law."

Now, while our _idea of God_ thus tells us that God has in his hand all
causal chains in the world, and its million-threaded web in constant
omni-surveying presence and in all-controlling omnipotence, our reflection
on the _world_ and its substance and course also leads us from the _a
posteriori_ starting-point of analytical investigation precisely to the
same result; it even leads us to a still more concrete conception of this
idea--namely, to the result, that not only the _causal chains, in their
totality and in their web_, but also _all single links_ of these chains,
{351} have their force and existence only by virtue of a transcendental, or
what is the same, of a _metaphysical_, cause.

For if we analyze the single phenomena in the world, we certainly observe
in the activity of their qualities and forces such a conformity to law,
that, in our reflection on these phenomena, we can go from one phenomenon
to the necessity of another as its cause or its effect, and thus form those
particular causal chains and causal nets in whose arranged representation
natural science consists. But that those qualities and forces exist and act
precisely thus, and not otherwise, and why, we are no longer able to
explain. We can only say: the material and the apparent is no longer their
cause, but their effect; therefore, the cause of that which comes into
existence lies beyond the phenomenon--_i.e._, in the transcendental, in the
metaphysical.

This becomes evident in the _inorganic world_ and in those qualities which
are common to all matter. Such common qualities of the latter are, for
instance, cohesion and gravitation. That all matter has the quality of
cohesion, we can only say because we observe it; but that it must be so,
and why, we are not able to say. This becomes still more evident in
gravitation. Gravitation is so decidedly an action in space, that it
appears to us, together with cohesion, as precisely the bond which binds
the entire material world together. Each single material atom is subject to
its force; but how an