But does not a development, like that which we here for the moment assume hypothetically, efface and destroy the specific value of man and mankind from still another side? Would not a _beginning_ of mankind be really lost, in case that theory of evolution should gain authority? and would not there still lie between that which is decidedly called animal world and that which is decidedly called mankind an innumerable series of generations of beings which were neither animal nor man? We do not believe it. What makes man _man_, {270} we can exactly point out: it is self-consciousness and moral self-determination. Now, in case development took place in the above sense, it may have passed ever so gradually; the epochs of preparation between that which we know as highest animal development and that which constitutes the substance of man, may have stretched over ever so many generations, and, if the friends of evolution desire it, we say over ever so many thousands of generations; yet that which makes man _man_--self-consciousness and moral self-determination--must have always come into actual reality in _individuals_. Those individuals in which self-consciousness came into existence and activity, for the first time, and with it the entire possibility of the world of ideas--the consciousness of moral responsibility, and with it also the entire dignity of moral self-determination--were the first men. The individuals which preceded the latter may have been ever so interesting and promising as objects of observation, if we imagine ourselves spectators of these once supposed processes; yet, they were not men. Sec. 4. _The Selection Theory and Theism._ The last scientific theory whose position in reference to theism we have to discuss, is the selection theory. We have found but little reason for sympathizing with this theory. But since we believed that we were obliged to suspect it, not for religious but for scientific reasons, so the completeness of our investigation requires us to assume hypothetically that the selection principle really manifests itself as the only and exclusive principle of the origin of species, and to ask now what position it would in such a case take in reference to theism. {271} The only answer we are able to give is decidedly favorable to theism.