Now these premises, indeed, indicate to us a _development_ of things, but a development of such a kind that there appears to us something new, and always new in a rising line. The rising of this line of development consists in the fact that the spiritual comes forth from the {328} natural in permanent progress and in always higher development: that mind vanquishes matter. The first new thing which meets us in the development of the globe, is the organic and life; the second, sensation and consciousness; the third, self-consciousness and free-will. Now let us once suppose imaginary human spectators of every first appearance of these phenomena. Would he who thus far had only known inorganic phenomena and processes, have dared, before the appearance of life, to utter the proposition: matter can also become living and live? And who would have dared to suggest the further doctrine: matter can also feel and get a consciousness of things? Finally, who would have dared even to say: matter can also become a self-conscious and free personality? To every person who would have pronounced such dreams of the future, there would have been opposed, apparently with full right, the inviolable mechanism of the inorganic world. But all this nevertheless took place. If something material can be led so far that a personality lives in it, that, with the assistance of this material basis, is able to perceive the ideas and the eternal, that can act in accordance with aims and designs and can set itself the highest aims, and that may even enter upon a loving and child-like relation to the highest primitive cause of all things, then we are no longer permitted to say that the material, of which the body of such a personality consists, could not have been subjected to the service of such a personality so far, that the latter could have vanquished the elements of the destruction of life in an eternal process of spontaneous renewal.