The years spent in southern Italy had certainly helped to bring out as strongly as possible the contrast between Goethe’s conception and the conventional idea of God as an extramundane Creator. No surroundings are more apt to do this than the Romance peoples of the Mediterranean. In the northern, Protestant countries the ecclesiastical tradition of Deity has always a spiritual element, a kind of vague resolution into moral laws, that in some measure approach natural law, though one made by man. There is no trace of this in Naples and Sicily. The supernatural there is the saint, the madonna; they penetrate unceasingly into the natural reality, in every little detail of life and conduct. The antithesis of the poor cosmic machinery and the ever-present heavenly help and supersession of it is raised to a supreme height in the popular belief. Miracles are not relegated to earlier days and ancient books. They are expected, affirmed, and believed every day. The saint fills the net of the fisherman as he chases the edible cuttle-fishes by torchlight. The saint makes the storm that threatens the boat—makes it suddenly out of nothing. The madonna can arrest in a second the glowing stream of lava that rolls towards the village from Vesuvius, and if hundreds of them unite in ardent prayer and the making of vows, she will be appeased and do it. Every hair on a man’s head is twofold; there is the natural hair and a hair that can at any moment be changed, transformed, annihilated, or created afresh from nothing, by divine power. The man who has lived in this atmosphere of practical Dualism for years must be saturated to his innermost being with a feeling of the absolute contradiction between this conception of God and nature and Goethe’s philosophy. If he is to follow Goethe, this ancient extramundane, ever-interfering Deity must be given up without the least attempt at compromise. Thus Haeckel’s position was incomparably more radical than Darwin’s from the very first. He no longer believed in a Creator, either in whole or part.