Natural Science follows the evolution of beings from the simplest up to the most perfected, to man himself. This evolution lies before us as already completed. We know it, by penetrating it with the powers of our spirit. When evolution has reached humanity, man then finds nothing further there before him as its continuation. He himself accomplishes the further unfoldment. Henceforward he _lives_ what for earlier stages he only _knows_. He creates, according to the object, that which, for what has gone before, he only copies in accordance with its spiritual nature. That truth is not one with the existent in nature, but naturally embraces both the existent and the non-existent: of this truth Tauler is filled to overflowing in all his feelings. It has been handed down to us that Tauler was led to this fulfilling by an illuminated layman, a “Friend of God from the Mountains.” We have here a mysterious story. As to where this “Friend of God” lived there exist only conjectures; as to who he was, not even these. He seems to have heard much of Tauler’s way of preaching, and to have resolved accordingly to journey to Tauler, who was then working as a preacher in Strassburg, in order to fulfil a certain duty by him. Tauler’s relation to the Friend of God, and the influence which the latter exercised upon the former, are to be found described in a text which is printed along with the oldest editions of Tauler’s sermons under the title, “The Book of the Master.” Therein a Friend of God, in whom some seek to recognise the same who came into relations with Tauler, gives an account of a “Master,” whom some assert to be Tauler himself. He relates how a transformation, a spiritual re-birth, was brought about in a certain “Master” and how the latter, when he felt his death drawing near, called his friend to him and begged him to write the story of his “enlightenment,” but yet to take care that no one should ever learn of whom the book speaks. He asks this on the ground that all the knowledge that proceeds from him is yet not really from him. “For know ye that God hath brought all to pass through me, poor worm, and that what it is, is not mine, it is of God.” A learned controversy which has connected itself with the occurrence is not of the very smallest importance for the essence of the matter. An effort was made to prove on one side[3] that the Friend of God never existed, but that his existence was fiction and that the books ascribed to him come from another hand (Rulman Merswin). On the other hand Wilhelm Preger has sought with many arguments (in his _History of German Mysticism_) to support the existence, the genuineness of the writings, and the correctness of the facts that relate to Tauler. [3] Denifle: _Die Dichtungen des Gottesfreundes im Oberlande_.