Perhaps this consideration goes still deeper, throwing light upon or suggesting the proper basis for a study of the domain of mind and of history. It is immediately obvious that there, at any rate, we enter into a region of phenomena which cannot be derived from anything antecedent, or reduced to anything lower. It must be one of the chief tasks of naturalism to explain away these facts, and to maintain the sway of “evolution,” not in our sense but in its own, that is “to explain” everything new and individual from that which precedes it. But the assertion that this can be done is here doubly false. For, in the first place, it cannot be proved that methods of study which are relatively valid for natural phenomena are applicable also to those of the mind. And in the second place we must admit that even in nature—apart from mind—we have to do with new beginnings which are underivable from their antecedents. All being is inscrutable mystery as a whole, and from its very foundations upwards through each successively higher stage of its evolution, in an increasing degree, until it reaches a climax in the incomprehensibility of individuality. It is a mystery that does not force itself into nature as supernatural or miraculous, but is fundamentally implicit in it, a mystery that in its unfolding assuredly follows the strictest law, the most inviolable rules, whether in the chemical affinities a higher grade of energies reveals itself, or whether—unquestionably also in obedience to everlasting law—the physical and chemical conditions admit of the occurrence of life, or whether in his own time and place a genius arises.(1) The Dependence of the Order of Nature. (2 and 3). The “dependence” of all things is the second requirement of religion, without which it is altogether inconceivable. We avoid the words “creation” and “being created,” because they involve anthropomorphic and altogether insufficient modes of representation. But throughout we have in mind, as suggested by Schleiermacher’s expression already quoted, what all religion means when it declares nature and the world to be _creatures_. The inalienable content of this idea is that deep and assured feeling that our nature and all nature does not rest in its own strength and self-sufficiency, that there must be more secure reasons for nature which are absolutely outside of it, and that it is dependent upon, and conditioned through and through by something above itself, independent, and unconditioned. “I believe that God has created me together with all creatures.” (Luther.)