It would suffice a humanity whose development had only reached so far as the capacity for emotion. So soon, however, as a being passes from the stage of the emotional and enters upon the stage of the cognitive, the morality of emotion no longer suffices, as little so as the reasons one is accustomed to give to children suffice the grown man. The emotional holds sway as long as an individual is not yet fully conscious of himself, not yet come to pure reflection. So soon as he is fully conscious, there arises also the need to understand ourselves as well as our morality and religion. Then only may I say that I _have_ morality and religion when I have understood them, when both have become functions of my cognition. So long as this is not the case, so long are religion and morality things of emotion, and these are subject to every conceivable variation. Hence the endless diversity of moralities as well as of religions in the stage of the emotional. Here both--to use the language of current speech--are mere matters of taste, lacking in all inner foundation. Hence also comes all that is unintelligible in the manners and customs connected with morality and religion among foreign peoples of ancient and of modern times. This is not the place to go into details. Every historical record, every account of civilization, furnishes abundant examples. Whether upon our globe a state of affairs has ever prevailed in which morality and religion have been exclusively things of emotion, it is impossible to say. The fact remains that at the point where, in our glance backward over the history of the world, man first emerges, the purity of emotional morality and religion is no longer intact. Historical man, as first presented to us in the states of Egypt and Babylonia, already exhibits a morality and religion which are no longer pure functions of emotion, but have now become functions of reflection. This necessity for reflection is given with the essential being of all that is real. As already said, all that is, on the one hand, presents itself as “_something that is_,” _i.e._ a being; and, on the other hand, as “something that happens,” _i.e._ a becoming; that is, as a process. Wherever something happens, an adequate cause must be present. And the world by its simple existence, by reason of its very nature as a process, is the standing incitement to comprehension, to reflection, inasmuch as the mind hankers after an adequate cause for all that occurs. “The apparent changes in organic being all about me,” says Goethe in his _Morphologie_, “took a strong hold of my mind. Imagination and nature seemed to strive with one another which of the two should stride forward with the bolder and firmer step.”