re, say that, without regard to the fact that neither
pantheism nor theism will ever harmonize with Fechner's solution of this
contrast which gives to God exactly the same position in the world as the
soul has in the body, natural science will certainly treat with great
reserve a cosmo-metaphysical system which so fully upsets all results of
exact investigations into the history of origin and development, and has no
other proof for itself than the identity, or at least the similarity, of
the abstract formula according to which the molecular motions of organisms
and the cosmical motions are performed. Although we thus have to deny to
the proof of this identity or similarity the weight which Fechner gives to
it, nevertheless it has still no small merit, since it throws new and
clearer light upon the old thought, always attractive and yet so difficult
to present,--of a macrocosmus and a microcosmus, which has been often
enough treated with so much natural mysticism.

Thus, in our inquiry into the development of things, we have successively
arrived at four points, each of which urged us to make the confession that
here something new came into existence, which can not be explained from the
preceding conditions of its being; these four points were: the origin of
self-consciousness, the origin of sensation and consciousness, the origin
of life, and finally the elements of the universe. Arrived at the last
problem, we see the confession of our ignorance increased to the still more
comprehensive confession that we are really not able _fully_ to explain
anything in the world. We are able to perceive a uniformity of law in the
states and {148} changes of things, and to abstract therefrom common laws
of nature; we can observe single objects, and perceive their states and
changes in their connection with one another and in their dependence on
those laws. But we are not able to explain scientifically either the origin
of these laws or the last physical causes of the qualities of things, which
follow these laws.

We should reach the same result if we had not started from the objective
world of the existing, as we were induced to do by our subject, but from
theoretical investigations. Here also we should immediately find ourselves
in a world of relations between subject and object, of a regularly arranged
abundance of subjective and objective qualities, states and processes, of
which the objective only come to our knowledge through the