all-sufficiency of nature, and the absence of any intervening influences from without or beyond nature. Rapidly and of necessity this last item becomes transformed into a “denial of teleology”: nature knows neither will nor purpose, it has only to do with conditions and results. With these it deals and through them it works. Even in the most elementary naturalistic idea, that “everything happens of itself,” there lurks that aversion to purpose which characterises all naturalistic systems. A naturalism which has arisen and grown in this manner has in itself nothing to do with concrete and exact knowledge of nature. It may comprise a large number of ideas which are sharply opposed to “science,” and which may be in themselves mythological, or poetical, or even mystical. For what “nature” itself really is fundamentally, how it moves, unfolds, or impels, how things actually happen “naturally,” this naturalism has never attempted to think out. Indeed, naturalism of this type, though it opposes “dualism,” does not by any means usually intend to set itself against religion. On the contrary, in its later developments, it may take it up into itself in the form of an apotheosis and a worship of nature. Almost invariably naturalism which begins thus develops, not into atheism, but into pantheism. It is true that all is nature and happens naturally. But nature itself, as Thales said, is “full of gods,” instinct with divine life. It is the all-living which, unwearied and inexhaustible, brings forth form after form and pours out its fulness. It is Giordano Bruno’s “Cause, Principle, and Unity,” in endless beauty and overpowering magnificence, and it is Goethe’s “Great Goddess,” herself the object of the utmost admiration, reverence, and devotion. This mood may readily pass over into a kind of worship of God and belief in Him, “God” being regarded as the soul and mind, the “Logos” of Heraclitus and the Stoics, the inner meaning and reason of this all-living nature. And thus naturalism in its last stages may sometimes be quite devout, and may assure us that it is compelled to deny only the transcendental and not the immanent God, the Divine being enthroned above the world, but not the living God dwelling within it. And ever anew Goethe’s verse is quoted: What God would _outwardly_ alone control, And on His finger whirl the mighty Whole? He loves the _inner_ world to move, to view Nature in Him, Himself in nature too, So that what in Him works, and is, and lives, The measure of His strength, His spirit gives. The True Naturalism.