If we apply this argument to the development of the organic world, those who defend mechanical development will not be compelled to deny a teleological power, only they would have with Kant[309] to think of the latter in the only way in which it can be conceived, viz. _as a Final Cause_. In the region of inorganic nature nobody any longer doubts the purely mechanical connection of the phenomena. Sunshine and rain do not now appear to us to be whims of a deity, but divine natural laws. As the knowledge of the processes of nature advances, the point where the divine power designedly interrupts these processes must be removed further back; or, as the author of the criticism of the philosophy of the Unconscious[310] expresses it, all advance in the knowledge of natural processes depends “upon the continual elimination of the idea of the miraculous.” We now believe that organic nature must be conceived as mechanical. But does it thereby follow that we must totally deny a final Universal Cause? Certainly not; it would be a great delusion if any one were to believe that he had arrived at a comprehension of the universe by tracing the phenomena of nature to mechanical principles. He would thereby forget that the assumption of eternal matter with its eternal laws by no means satisfies our intellectual need for causality. We require before everything an explanation of the fact that relationships everywhere exist between the parts of the universe--that atoms everywhere act upon one another.[311] He who can content himself with the assumption of matter may do so, but he will not be able to show that the assumption of a Universal Cause underlying the laws of nature is erroneous.