the speculations of the learned and in ingenuous popular beliefs? A scholastic prejudice, an idol of the intellect, the hypostasis of that concept of "nature" that Logic has taught us is nothing but the abstract, mechanicizing, classifying function of the human spirit; a prejudice arising from the substitution of the naturalistic method for reality, by which a function is changed and materialized into a group of beings. Those idealists were also slaves of the error of a like hypostasis, who, though they thought everything as an activity of the spirit, yet stopped when face to face with _Nature,_ making of it an inferior grade of the Spirit, or, metaphorically, a spirit alienated from itself, an unconscious; consciousness, a petrified thought, and creating for it a special philosophy (as though all the other did not suffice), entitled precisely, _Philosophy of nature._ But modern thought knows henceforth how man creates for his use that skeleton or _mannequin_ of an immobile, external mechanical nature, and he is no longer permitted to fall back into equivoque and substitute this for entity or for a complex of entities. Nor should he find any difficulty in discovering everywhere activity, development, consciousness, with its antitheses of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Certainly the stars do not smile, nor is the moon pale for sorrow: these are images of the poets. Certainly animals and trees do not reason like men; this, when it is not poetry, is gross anthropomorphism. But nature, in her intimate self, longs for the good and abhors the evil, she is all wet with tears and all a-shiver for joy; strife and victory is everywhere and in every moment of universal life. [Sidenote: _Optimism and pessimism; critique._]