30. 

 ature and 



OF THE SPIRIT. 341 



is not purely transcendent but is at the same time 

 immanent in the world as we know it. As we have 

 seen on a former occasion,^ the materialists of the 

 school of Biichner and Vogt unknowingly admitted this 

 point by using the terms " matter " and " force " in a 

 sense which was not purely mechanical, and Haeckel, 

 on his part, concedes the same point by endowing his 

 underlying substance with mental, i.e., non- mechanical 

 attributes or properties ; not to speak of other systems 

 which take refuge in such indefinite principles as the 

 Unconscious, the Sub-conscious, the Unknowable, or 

 the Incognoscible. 



The effect of this open or covert admission of a ^.^ 

 transcendent spiritual principle into the region of naufrar"^ 

 sensuous phenomena has been to alter and widen the 

 conception of nature or of the natural order. Nature 

 is now no more, even to the scientific thinker, a 

 mechanical contrivance like a complicated and highly 

 ingenious engine coming, more or less perfect, from the 

 hands of its maker, as it was alike to the supernatural- 

 ists and rationalists of the eighteenth century. Nature 

 is — what it always has been to the common -sense 

 view — a texture in which the mechanical warp is shot 

 through everywhere by the spiritual woof. 



The term supernatural has therefore lost its meaning 

 in the eyes of many modern thinkers. The spiritual 

 principle is not above nature but everywhere per- 

 meates it. Notably the highest phenomenon which 

 nature presents to us, the phenomenon of consciousness, 

 our subjective experience of an inner unity of thought 



^ See supra, vol. iii. p. 565, 601, sqq. 



