morality_ get from
these investigations, and which consists in the new and comprehensive
confirmation of the conviction, {401} which, indeed, was established
before, that religion and morality--Christian religion and Christian
morality--rest on foundations which can no longer be shaken by any result
of exact investigation.

The triumph with which the Darwinian theories were greeted by many as the
new sun before whose rising all that mankind had thus far called light and
sun turns pale, and the antipathy with which, on that very account, many to
whom their religious and ethical acquisitions are a sacred sanctuary, turn
away from these theories, urged us to investigate their position in
reference to religion and morality. Now, if these theories had produced a
certain undoubted result, we should unquestionably have been satisfied with
the examination of the position of religion and morality in reference to
this certain result. But since not a single result of those investigations
is really established, we have found ourselves obliged to give our
investigation a much greater extension and to discuss even all imaginable
_possibilities_. The beneficial result of this comparison was, that
religion and morality not only remain at peace with all imaginable
possibilities of _scientific_ theories, but can also, in the realm of the
_philosophy of the doctrines of nature_, be passive spectators of all
investigations and attempts, even of all possible excursions into the realm
of fancy, without being obliged to interfere. It is in the realm of _mere
metaphysics_ that we first perceive an antagonist whose victory would
indeed be fatal to the religious and ethical acquisitions of mankind: this
antagonist is called elimination from nature of the idea of design.
Fortunately, this metaphysical idea is in such striking opposition not only
to the whole world of facts but also to all logical {402} reasoning, it has
everywhere, where man perceives organization and a difference between lower
and higher, especially in the contemplation of the world, of this _cosmos_
of wonderful order and beauty, so decidedly all philosophical as well as
all exact sciences as its adversaries, it lays its hands so rudely and so
destructively not only upon the religious and ethical acquisitions but also
upon all ideal remaining acquisitions of mankind, that religion and
morality know, when fighting this adversary, they are in firm accord with
all the spiritual int