I spoke deliberately when I said to _many_ of these questioning feelings and perplexities of the human mind, and not all of them. For to expect a satisfactory answer to them all in the present state of science, or generally in this terrestrial life, brief as it is, and limited on all sides and short-sighted, would be agreeable neither with the course nor whole constitution of human affairs. A thoroughly complete and perfectly systematic demonstration of the wisdom in the divine order of nature, which should meet and explain every difficulty, would, even on account of such a pretension, command little respect, and be of slight influence. Much is there in nature which is to remain long hidden from man; much, too, which we shall see first of all in the other world, when death shall have opened our eyes and made us clear-sighted in one direction or another. But the beginning and the end are even here and now placed clearly and intelligibly before us, if only we are ready and willing to walk by the light that is so graciously given us, and here, as elsewhere, invariably to refer the first cause and the final consummation to the Creator and to God. Without such a reference, without thus, as it were, placing its two poles in God, the right understanding of nature is absolutely impossible, and every scientific attempt to attain it apart from and independently of God, must simply as such prove vain and involve itself in absurdities. Hence it is, however paradoxical it may sound, that we can recognize more distinctly, and better understand the end of nature, its meaning and significance as a whole, than we can the final cause of many a single object in it, which, however, as contrasted with the whole, appears inconsiderable and trifling. For the clear perception that we have of the final cause of nature comes immediately from the divine illumination, which therefore we can, so far as it is given to us, see and understand. But in the darker levels, in the subterranean shaft of the obscure sensible world, the prophetic candle of an antlike burrowing science, even though it be originally kindled at that higher light, can not reach to every quarter, can not illuminate every object in this mine of darkness.