he amphibian, or the reptile, or the bird, or, lastly,
man,--it has but one wonder before it, the Logos, the idea of thought, or
of the eternal thinker, who thought everything that exists in natural
sequence, and in this sense made all. In this view we need not even
abandon the survival of the fittest, only it proceeds in the Logos, in the
mind, not in the outward phenomenal world. It would then also become
conceivable that the embryological development of animated nature runs
parallel with the biological or historical, or as it were recapitulates
it, only the continuity of the idea is far closer and more intimate than
that of the reality. Thus, for instance, in the development of the human
embryo, the transition from the invertebrate to the vertebrate may be
represented in the reality by the isolated amphioxus, which remains
stationary where vertebrate man begins, and can make no step forward,
while the human embryo advances farther and farther till it reaches its
highest limit.

In order now to infer from these and similar facts that man at one time
really existed in this scarcely vertebrate condition of the amphioxus,--a
conclusion which, strictly understood, yields no meaning,--we can make the
case much more easily conceivable if we represent the thinking, or
invention of the world, as an ascending scale, in which even the least
chromatic tone must have a place without a break, while the principal
tones do not become clear and full until the requisite number of
vibrations is attained. These gradations of tone are the really
interesting thing in nature. As the full, clear tones imply certain
numerical relations among the vibrations, so the successive stages or the
true species in nature imply a will or thought in which the true _Origin
of Species_ has its foundation. That natural selection, as it is called,
could suffice to explain the origin of species, was doubted even by
Huxley,(38) who yet described himself as Darwin's bull-dog.

If we have followed the supporters of my Horseherd so far, I should like
here to enter a caveat, that is indeed of no great significance, but may
turn one or another from a by-way, which the Horseherd himself has not
avoided. He speaks of the place of man in nature; he thinks (like so many
others) that man is not only an animal belonging to the mammalia, which no
one has ever denied, but that he is of the same nature as the animal
world. He need not therefore have accepted the whole simi