It is true, with such a concession alone we have not {329} gained anything directly. For _in abstracto_ everything is finally conceivable which does not contradict the logical laws of reasoning--even the basilisk and the mountain of diamonds in stories and fairy tales. But such an _abstract_ conceivableness has not the least value for the knowledge of the _real_, nor even for the knowledge of the _really possible_. For in the world of being and becoming, everything in its last elements, forces, qualities, and laws, as well as in the last causes of its development, is something so absolutely _given_, that only afterward are we able to analyze that which is present, from our observations, or to follow from the given factors that which can be, or which under other conditions would have become different, and that we are not able to synthetically construct the one or the other in advance, independently from the factors of reality. If, therefore, that concession shall attain a scientific value, and if the conditional sentence: Man would not have been subject to death if he had not sinned, is to become an admitted and unassailable part of Christian theology, we have to look in the realm of phenomena, and in the course of that which took place, for _facts_ which _prove_ that man, if he had not committed sin, would not have died, and which thus change that merely abstract, possibility into a real one. Now we have such a fact in the _resurrection of the Lord_. If it really took place, then it is the last earthly stage in the course of the Lord's work of Redemption, and then it permits us to draw conclusions backwards as to what would have become of man, if he had not been in need of this redemption, if he had had a sinless development instead of one with sin. {330}