7io Studies in the Theory of Descent. 



longer doubts the purely mechanical connection 

 of the phenomena. Sunshine and rain do not 

 now appear to us to be whims of a deity, but 

 divine natural laws. As the knowledge of the 

 processes of nature advances, the point where the 

 divine power designedly interrupts these processes 

 must be removed further backj or, as the author 

 of the criticism of the philosophy of the Un- 

 conscious 6 expresses it, all advance in the know- 

 ledge of natural processes depends " upon the 

 continual elimination of the idea of the miracu- 

 lous." We now believe that organic nature must 

 be conceived as mechanical. But does it thereby 

 follow that we must totally deny a final Universal 

 Cause? Certainly not; it would be a great 

 delusion if any one were to believe that he had 

 arrived at a comprehension of the universe by 

 tracing the phenomena of nature to mechanical 

 principles. He would thereby forget that the 

 assumption of eternal matter with its eternal laws 

 by no means satisfies our intellectual need for 

 causality. We require before everything an ex- 

 planation of the fact that relationships everywhere 

 exist between the parts of the universe that 

 atoms everywhere act upon one another. 7 He 

 who can content himself with the assumption 



8 " Das Unbewusste vom Standpunke der Physiologic und 

 Descendenz-Theorie," Berlin, 1872, p. 16. 



1 [Eng. ed. See Lotze's " Mikrokosmos," ist ed., vol. iii. 

 PP- 477483-] 



