f causes as a system of means.
To enable me to do this, it is only requisite that internal necessity
should govern the system, and that the result should not be a chance one,
so that it might even have been suppressed, have failed, or have turned
out quite differently. Necessity and predetermination are characteristic
of the relation between means and purpose. But this requisite is precisely
that which natural science does afford us,--namely, the proof that all
phenomena are strictly governed by law, and are absolutely predetermined
by their antecedents. At this point the religious and the scientific
consideration coincide exactly. The hairs of our head, and the hairs in
the fur of a polar bear, which is varying towards white, and is therefore
selected in the struggle for existence,(36) even the fluctuating
variations of a determinant in the germ, are "numbered" according to both
conceptions. Every variation that cropped up, every factor that "selected"
the fit, and eliminated the unfit, was strictly predestined, and must of
necessity have appeared as, and when, and where it did appear.(37)

The whole nexus of conditions and results, the inclined plane of evolution
and the power of Being to move up it, has its sufficient reason in the
nature and original state of the cosmos, in the constitution of its
"matter," its "energy," its laws, its sequences and the grouping of its
phenomena. Only from beginnings so constituted could our present world
have come to be as it is, and that necessarily. Only because the primary
possibility and fitness for life--vegetable, animal and human--was in it
from the beginning, could all these have come to be. This primary
possibility did not "come into being," it was _a priori_ immanent in it.
Whence came this? There is no logical, comprehensible, or any other
necessity why there should be a world at all, or why it should be such
that life and evolution must become part of it. Where then lies the reason
why it is, rather than is not, and why it is as it is?

To this must be added what Weismann himself readily admits and expressly
emphasises. The whole theory treats, and must treat plant, animal, and man
as only ingenious machines, mere systems of physical processes. This is
the ideal aimed at--to interpret all the phenomena of life, growth, and
reproduction thus. Even instincts and mental endowments are so
interpreted, since there must be corresponding morphological variations of
the fine str