To these leading masters in biology, and to all other anatomists, physiologists, zoologists, and botanists up to 1858, the question of organic creation was an unsolved problem; the great majority regarded it as insoluble. The theologians and their allies, the metaphysicians, built triumphantly on this fact. It afforded a clear proof of the limitations of reason and science. A miracle only could account for the origin of these ingenious and carefully designed organisms; nothing less than the Divine wisdom and omnipotence could have brought man into being. But this general resignation of reason, and the dominance of supernatural ideas which it encouraged, were somewhat paradoxical in the thirty years between Lyell and Darwin, between 1830 and 1859, since the natural evolution of the earth, as conceived by the great geologist, had come to be universally recognised. Since the earlier of these dates the iron necessity of natural law had ruled in inorganic nature, in the formation of the mountains and the movement of the heavenly bodies. In organic nature, on the contrary, in the creation and the life of animals and plants, people saw only the wisdom and power of an intelligent Creator and Controller; in other words, everything was ruled by mechanical causality in the inorganic world, but by teleological finality in the realm of biology. Philosophy, strictly so called, paid little or no attention to this dilemma. Absorbed almost exclusively in metaphysical and dialectical speculations, it looked with supreme contempt or indifference on the enormous progress that the empirical sciences were making. It affected, in its character of "purely mental science," to build up the world out of its own head, and to have no need of the splendid material that was being laboriously gathered by observation and experiment. This is especially true of Germany, where Hegel's system of "absolute idealism" had secured the highest regard, particularly since it had been made obligatory as "the royal State-philosophy of Prussia"--mainly because, according to Hegel, "in the State the Divine will itself and the monarchical constitution alone represent the development of reason; all other forms of constitution are lower stages of the development of reason." Hegel's abstruse metaphysics has also been greatly appreciated because it has made so thorough and consistent a use of the idea of evolution. But this pretended "evolution of reason" floated far above real nature in the pure ether of the absolute spirit, and was devoid of all the material ballast that the empirical science of the evolution of the world, the earth, and its living population, had meantime accumulated. Moreover, it is well known how Hegel himself declared, with humorous resignation, that only _one_ of his many pupils had understood him, and this one had misunderstood him.