It will be the characteristic task of the twentieth century, as compared with the nineteenth, to get rid of this system of superficial causality, whose roots reach back into the rationalism of the Baroque period, and to put in its place a pure physiognomic. We are sceptics in regard to any and every mode of thought which “explains” causally. We let things speak for themselves, and confine ourselves to sensing the Destiny immanent in them and contemplating the form-manifestations that we shall never penetrate. The extreme to which we can attain is the discovery of causeless, purposeless, purely existent forms underlying the changeful picture of nature. For the nineteenth century the word “evolution” meant progress in the sense of increasing fitness of life to purposes. For Leibniz--whose _Protogæa_ (1691), a work full of significant thought, outlines, on the basis of studies made in the Harz silver-mines, a picture of the world’s infancy that is Goethian through and through--and for Goethe himself it meant fulfilment in the sense of increasing connotation of the form. The two concepts, Goethe’s form-fulfilment and Darwin’s evolution, are in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history. There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palæontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely “transitional” types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but _appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape_; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which _exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types_, in the grouping of to-day. We see how, amongst fish, the Selachians, with their simple form, appear first in the foreground of history and then slowly fade out again, while the Teleostians slowly bring a more perfected fish-type to predominance. The same applies to the plant-world of the ferns and horsetails, of which only the last species now linger in the fully developed kingdom of the flowering plants. But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality.[34] It is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever-sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is given also a definite _energy_ of the form--by virtue of which in the course of its