ucture of the nervous organ, and instinctive actions are then
"explained" as the functions of these. But how "mechanical happening"
comes to have this marvellous inwardness, which we call sensation,
feeling, perception, thought and will, which is neither mechanical nor
derivable from anything mechanical; and, further, how physical and
psychical can condition one another without doing violence to the law of
the conservation of the sum of energy, is an absolute riddle. But this
whole psychical world exists, with graduated stages perhaps as close to
each other as in the physical world, but even less capable than these of
being explained as having arisen out of their antecedent lower stages. And
this psychical world, which is, indeed, related to and dependent upon the
corporeal life, as also conversely, has its own quite peculiar laws:
thought does not follow natural laws, but those of logic, which is
entirely indifferent to exciting stimuli, for instance of the brain, which
conform to natural laws. But this world, its riddles and mysteries, its
great content and its history, beyond the reach of mechanical theories, is
so absolutely the main thing (especially in regard to the question of the
possibility of religion), that the question of bodily structure and
evolution becomes beside it a mere accessory problem, and even the last is
only a relatively unimportant roundabout way of coming at the gist of the
business. How completely the evolution of the higher mental faculties
transcends such narrow and meagre formulae as the struggle for existence
and the like, Weismann himself indicates in connection with man's musical
sense, and its relation to the "musical" instinct in animals. The same and
much more might be alleged in regard to the whole world of mind, of the
aesthetic, ethical and religious, of the kingdom of thought, of science,
and of poetry.

Natural Selection.

We have for the moment provisionally admitted the theory of natural
selection, in order to see whether it could be included in a religious
interpretation of things. But in reality such an admission is not to be
thought of, in face of what is at present so apparent--the breaking down of
this hypothesis, which has been upheld with so much persistence. We shall
have to occupy ourselves with this later on. In the meantime a few more
remarks must be added to what has been already said.

It might be said, paradoxically, that the worst fate that could befall