impenetrable darkness. In the first place, the whole idea of “explaining” in terms of “evolution” is a futile one. The process of becoming is pictured as a simple process of cumulation, a gradual increase of intensities, while the business is really one of change in quality and the introduction of what is new. In the second place, the occurrence even of the first and most primitive sensation contains the whole riddle concentrated on a single point. In the third place, the riddle meets us anew and undiminished in every developing individual. For to say that the physical inwardness, once it has arisen, is “transmitted,” is not an explanation but merely an admission that the riddle exists. And the idea that the psychical is just a penumbra or shadow of reality, which comes of itself and so to speak gratis, is quite inadmissible from the point of view of strict natural science. There are no longer _luxus_ and _lusus naturæ_. Reality cannot throw a “shadow.” According to the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, we must be able to show whence it gets the so-called shadow, and with what it compensates for it. Pre-eminence of Consciousness. But we have already spent too much time over this naïve mode of looking at things, which, though it professes to place things in their true light, in reality distorts them and turns them upside down. As if this world of the external and material, all these bodies and forces, were our first and most direct data, and were not really all derived from, and only discoverable by, consciousness. We have here to do with the ancient view of all philosophy and all reflection in general, although in modern days it has taken its place as a great new discovery even among naturalists themselves, by whom it is extolled and recognised as “the conquest of materialism.” Such exaggerated emphasis tends to conceal the fact that this truth has been regarded as self-evident from very early times.