342 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



and personality — Kant's unity of apperception — is as 

 much as anything else a natural and everyday phe- 

 nomenon, though it is not purely mechanical. The 

 spiritual, in fact, is not supernatural in the older sense 

 of the word, but is rather intra-mechanical — i.e., it 

 permeates or underlies everywhere the mechanical con- 

 nection of things. And if we designate by the term 

 miraculous simply that which is contrary to the uniform 

 and customary experience of men, then the spiritual 

 as it reveals itself daily in the life and action of human 

 beings, in the events of past and present history, and, 

 to a lesser degree, in the animated creation, possibly 

 also, as the underlying and sustaining power in the 

 cosmical world — i.e., in the universe — is not identical 

 with the miraculous. 

 40. This conception of the intimate intertwining of the 



The median- " 



icaiand the mcchanical and spiritual had been brought out with con- 



spmtual in •■■ o 



^'^*- siderable clearness already by Kant in his third "Critique," 



where the indication at least of a view is given in which 

 the dualism of the first two Critiques is superseded by a 

 monistic view. It was accordingly the ideas thrown 

 out, rather than elaborated, by Kant in this the latest 

 of his great works which formed the starting-point for 

 the monistic speculations of Schelling, and in which 

 Goethe likewise welcomed a congenial suggestion. Then 

 came a period in philosophic thought in which the 

 spiritual factor of experience was unduly emphasised 

 with little knowledge and still less appreciation of the 

 importance of the mechanical ; and when, on the other 

 side, the mechanical relations were exclusively studied 

 with a corresponding neglect of all spiritual phenomena. 



