In modern times, the _theory of evolution_ is in high favour. On earth we do not only see life, but life in a great variety of forms, from plant to man. The question, whence this variety, admits in its turn only of the alternative: either it was immediately created by God’s hand, or it is the result of a slow evolution from common original forms. Whether there has been an evolution within the vegetable and animal kingdom is a problem for natural science. But it is a philosophical question, whether the essentially superior human soul, endowed with spirituality and reason, could have evolved from the inferior animal soul. Philosophy must answer: No, just as impossible as to evolve ten from two, or a whole book from a single proofsheet. Faith says the human soul is created by God. We do not intend to discuss the problem here any further, but shall only point out how science here, too, expressly or tacitly, is determined very energetically by the presumption of the exclusive natural causation; this is applied to the entire theory of evolution, but especially in regard to man. “The notion of the evolution of the living world on earth,” thus states _Weismann_ quite significantly, “extends far beyond the provinces of individual sciences, and it influences our entire range of thoughts. This notion means nothing less than the elimination of miracle from our knowledge of nature, and the classification of the phenomena of life on an equal footing with the rest of natural events.” The guiding motive is plainly in evidence. The aim to eliminate the “miracle of creation” is manifested even more conspicuously in the question about the origin of man: man with his entire equipment, intellectual as well as cultural, must have evolved upward from the most imperfect rudiments; this is regarded as a self-evident proposition. _M. Hoernes_, for instance, writes: “The Cosmogonies, _i.e._, the theories of creation, of all nations ascribe the origin of man to a supernatural act of creation, whereby the Creator is imagined as a human being, because at the intellectual stage corresponding to these notions something created could only be conceived as something formed, something constructed.” Thus the theory of creation, and the Christian doctrine of the genesis of man, is disposed of as a notion of the lower intellect. “On the contrary, we are taught by science to look upon the highest mammals as our nearest blood-relatives.” This “we are taught by science,” although it is confessed: “We know the fact of the existence of the man of the fourth, or glacial, period, but we have not a solitary fact that would throw light upon his origin and his previous existence.”