22 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
creative power be worshipped as a personal god, or whether 
it be termed the power of life (vis vitalis), or final cause 
(causa finalis). In any case, to express it in one word, its 
supporters have recourse to a miracle for an explanation. 
They throw themselves into the arms of a poetic faith, 
which as such can have no value in the domain of scientific 
knowledge. 
All that was done before Darwin, to establish a natural 
mechanical conception of the origin of animals and plants, 
has been in vain, and until his time no theory gained a 
general recognition. Darwin’s theory first succeeded in 
doing this, and thus has rendered an immense service. For 
the idea of the wnity of organic and imorganic nature 
is now firmly established; and that branch of natural 
science which had longest and most obstinately opposed 
mechanical conception and explanation, viz. the science of 
the structure of animate forms, is launched on to identically 
the same road towards perfection as that along which all the 
rest of the natural sciences are travelling. The unity of all 
natural phenomena is by Darwin’s theory finally established. 
This unity of all nature, the animating of all matter, the 
inseparability of mental power and corporeal substance, 
Goethe has asserted in the words: “Matter can never exist 
and be active without mind, nor can mind without matter.” 
These first principles of the mechanical conception of the 
universe have been taught by the great monistic philosophers 
of all ages. Even Democritus of Abdera, the immortal 
founder of the Atomic theory, clearly expressed them about 
500 years before Christ; but the great Dominican friar, 
Giordano Bruno, did so even more explicitly. For this he 
was burnt at the stake, by the Christian inquisition in 
