The great foundation question of all, especially new, philosophies is connected with the relation between thinking and being. Since very early times when men, being in complete ignorance respecting their own bodies, and stirred by apparitions,[1] arrived at the idea that thought and sensation were not acts of their own bodies, but of a special soul dwelling in the body and deserting it at death, ever since then they have been obliged to give thought to the relations of this soul to the outside world. If it betook itself from the body and lived on, there was no reason to invent another death for it; thus arose the conception of their immortality, which, at that evolutionary stage, did not appear as a consolation, but as fate, against which a man cannot strive, and often enough, as among the Greeks, as a positive misfortune. Not religious desire for consolation but uncertainty arising from a similar universal ignorance of what to associate with the soul when once it was acknowledged, after the death of the body, led universally to the tedious idea of personal immortality. Just in a similar fashion the first gods arose, through the personification of the forces of nature, and these in the further development of the religions acquired greater and greater supernatural force, until by a natural process of abstraction, I might say of distillation, from the many more or less limited and mutually limiting gods, in the course of spiritual development, at last the idea of the one all embracing god of the monotheistic religions took its place in the minds of men. The question of the relation of thinking to being, of the relation of the spirit to nature, the highest question of universal philosophy, has therefore, no less than all religion, its roots in the limited and ignorant ideas of the condition of savagery. It could first be understood, and its full significance could first be grasped, when mankind awoke from the long winter sleep of Christian Middle Ages. The question of the relation of thought to existence, a question which had also played a great role in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the question what is at the beginning spirit or nature, this question was in spite of the church now cut down to this: "Has God made the world or is the world from eternity?" As this question was answered this way or that the philosophers were divided into two great camps. The one party which placed the origin of the spirit before that of nature, and therefore in the last instance accepted creation, in some form or other--and this creation, is often according to the philosophers, according to Hegel for example, still more odd and impossible than in Christianity--made the camp of idealism. The others, who recognized nature as the source, belong to the various schools of materialism.