_Du Bois-Reymond_ speaks very frankly: “Albeit, in holding to this theory we may feel like a man kept from drowning only by holding firmly to a plank just strong enough to keep him afloat. But when we have to choose between a plank and death, the preference will decidedly be with the plank.” The same idea is expressed somewhat more gracefully by _W. Ostwald_: “That the quite complicated problem concerning the purposiveness of organism loses its character of a riddle, at least in principle, and assumes the aspect of a scientific task, all by virtue of this simple thought ... is a gain that cannot be sufficiently appreciated.” With vehement plainness _H. Spitzer_ maintains: “Purposiveness in nature, which was feared by positive research like a ghost, because it really seemed only to be due to the intervention of ghosts in the course of the world, has now been traced by _Darwin_ to its origin from natural causes, and he thereby made it a fit object for the science that is at home only in the sphere of natural causes.” “To the height of this point of view,” _D. F. Strauss_ boasts, “we have been led by modern natural research in _Darwin_.”(8) At any rate one thing is settled: “The theological explanation must be rejected,” as _Plate_ puts it. “It sees in adaptation the proof for the love and kindness of a Creator, who has ordered all organisms most conformable to their purpose. Natural Science cannot accept such an explanation.” Is this the boasted spirit of truthfulness, which desires only the truth,—but is evading it persistently? Is this that unbiassed eye that seeks only the truth? Truly, it seems to be unsound, since it cannot bear the rays of truth. Let us go to another workshop of liberal science. It is known now that our earth has once been a ball of glowing fluid, with a temperature in which no living being could exist. Consequently the latter must have appeared at a later stage of evolution. As a fact, palæontology does not show any remnants of organisms in the lower strata of the earth. Now again a question suggests itself to the scientist, _Whence did the first life come from?_ We have the choice of only two explanations: either it has risen by itself, out of unorganic, dead matter, or it was produced by the hand of a Creator: either by _generatio aequivoca_ or the act of creation. Now there has never been observed a _generatio aequivoca_, as is testified to by natural science itself, and never has it been accomplished in the laboratory. Therefore, inasmuch as the natural laws of olden times cannot have been any different from those of the present, there has never been a primordial genesis. Do they perhaps give the Creator his due here, where the case is so obvious? Let us see.