nonsenses within science, is a misdirected attempt to deal mechanically with the _living_ content of scientific knowledge (for knowledge implies someone to know, and though the substance of thought may be “Nature” the _act_ of thought is history), and so with life itself as an inverted causality. Teleology is a caricature of the Destiny-idea which transforms the _vocation_ of Dante into the _aim_ of the savant. It is the deepest and most characteristic tendency both of Darwinism—the megalopolitan-intellectual product of the most abstract of all Civilizations—and of the materialist conception of history which springs from the same root as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic and fateful. Thus the morphological element of the Causal is a _Principle_, and the morphological element of Destiny is an _Idea_, an idea that is incapable of being “cognized,” described or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of which one is either entirely ignorant or else—like the man of the spring and every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet—entirely certain. Thus Destiny is seen to be the true _existence-mode of the prime phenomenon_, that in which the living idea of becoming unfolds itself immediately to the intuitive vision. And therefore the Destiny-idea dominates the whole world-picture of history, while causality, which is the existence-mode of _objects_ and stamps out of the world of sensations a set of well-distinguished and well-defined _things_, _properties_ and _relations_, dominates and penetrates, as the form of the understanding, the Nature-world that is the understanding’s “alter ego.” But inquiry into the degree of validity of causal connexions within a presentation of nature, or (what is henceforth the same thing for us) into the destinies involved in that presentation, becomes far more difficult still when we come to realize that for primitive man or for the child no comprehensive causally-ordered world exists at all as yet and that we ourselves, though “late” men with a consciousness disciplined by powerful speech-sharpened thought, can do no more, even in moments of the most strained attention (the only ones, really, in which we are exactly in the physical focus), than _assert_ that the causal order which we see in such a moment is continuously present in the actuality around us. Even waking, we take in the actual, “the living garment of the Deity,” _physiognomically_, and we do so involuntarily and by virtue of a power of experience that is rooted in the deep sources of life.