ng nature. And thus naturalism in its
last stages may sometimes be quite devout, and may assure us that it is
compelled to deny only the transcendental and not the immanent God, the
Divine being enthroned above the world, but not the living God dwelling
within it. And ever anew Goethe's verse is quoted:

What God would _outwardly_ alone control,
And on His finger whirl the mighty Whole?
He loves the _inner_ world to move, to view
Nature in Him, Himself in nature too,
So that what in Him works, and is, and lives,
The measure of His strength, His spirit gives.

The True Naturalism.

But naturalism becomes fundamentally different when it ceases to remain at
the level of naive or fancifully conceived ideas of "nature" and "natural
occurrences," when, instead of poetry or religious sentiments, it
incorporates something else, namely, exact natural science and the idea of
a mathematical-mechanical calculability in the whole system of nature.
"Nature" and "happening naturally", as used by the naive intelligence, are
half animistic ideas and modes of expression, which import into nature, or
leave in it, life and soul, impulse, and a kind of will. And that
speculative form of naturalism which tends to become religious develops
this fault to its utmost. But a "nature" like this is not at all a
possible subject for natural science and exact methods, not a subject for
experiment, calculation, and fixed laws, for precise interpretation, or
for interpretation on simple rational principles. Instead of the naive,
poetical, and half mystical conceptions of nature we must have a really
scientific one, so that, so to speak, the supernatural may be eliminated
from nature, and the apparently irrational rationalised; that is, so that
all its phenomena may be traced back to simple, unequivocal, and easily
understood processes, the actual why and how of all things perceived, and
thus, it may be, understood; so that, in short, everything may be seen to
come about "by natural means."

There is obviously one domain and order of processes in nature which
exactly fulfils those requirements, and is really in the fullest sense
"natural," that is, quite easily understood, quite rational, quite
amenable to computation and measurement, quite rigidly subordinate to laws
which can be formulated. These are the processes of physics and chemistry,
and in a still higher degree those of movement in general, the processes
o