Darwinian theory that it sufficiently fluidized for thought, the world of living beings, broke up the rigid conception of species, the belief in single acts of creation, as to render them accessible to a physical mode of apprehension; the which always amounts to a mechanistic mode, to a falling, even where it calls itself the mode of energetics. His theory of natural selection is, in the strictest sense of the words, a liquidation of the inventory of antiquated ideas. But be it well noted: like the greatness of every mechanistic view, the greatness of the Darwinian thought resides in its purely re-active quality, in the fact that it only furnishes biological relation-values. I incline to look upon the reception and interpretation which the Darwinian teaching has received at the hands of science as one of the hugest jokes world-history--taken in the biological, not the historical sense--has ever indulged in at the expense of the human mind. It is more than a joke; it is a stroke of wit! In all seriousness men wrangle as to whether Darwin’s doctrine is true or false; which is the same as if they disputed, for example, about the truth or falsity of the decimal system. Men find that the longer the theory of natural selection is tested, the more frequently does it fail them; which is the same as if a man bent upon measuring everything regardless of distinctions with a yard-stick, should find, the longer he proceeds, an ever increasing number of things that do not admit of being measured by such a scale. In fine, men so comport themselves, that oftentimes one could almost wish to live sufficiently long to hear the helpless laughter of posterity. And, with it all, what erudition! It is unfailingly interesting and instructive to observe the difference between biology and physics. In the latter is found a sort of well-bred _savoir vivre_, a clear perception of the relativity of all knowledge-values--Pontius Pilate’s query translated with all the refinements of mechanistics into physicist phraseology. In the former, in modern monism, is heard the droning, “A mighty stronghold is our God,” sung in unison by shepherd and sheep; wherein, to be sure, by the word “God” one does not mean that jealous God who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, but that abstract creature of air, “the law of evolution” which in retrospective wise, seeks to avenge the follies of the children upon the fathers. Yet once more be it said, The doctrine of the evolution of life out of one primordial form to forms that mount by degrees ever higher and higher, is of purely symbolical significance, as indeed every law is of purely symbolical significance, inasmuch as it furnishes nothing save the possibility of grouping together in one definite connection a large, nay, a limitless number of phenomena.