If that which has sensation and that which has it not, are to be brought genetically near one another, and hence the difference between the two at the point where the lowest sentient being has found its first existence, is to be made void or at least bridged over, then it is much more reasonable, and also in the line of Strauss's solution, to deny the difference between that which has sensation and that which has it not, and to do this in the sense in which we also declare that to be sentient which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as without sensation; and we should likewise attribute sensation to the original elements of the world, be they called atoms or whatever one may wish. This is done by Zoellner and by the before mentioned "Anonymus." This conclusion is logical; it is even the only possible conclusion, if we once start from the axiom that the new, which comes {130} into existence, must necessarily be explainable from agencies previously active, and known to or imagined by us through abstractions and hypotheses. Zoellner is certainly right when, in his work which appeared before the lecture of DuBois-Reymond, he puts the alternative, "either to renounce forever the conceivableness of the phenomena of sensation, or hypothetically to add to the common qualities of matter one more, which places the simplest and most elementary transactions of nature under a process of sensation, legitimately connected with it;" as also when he says (page 327): "We may regard the intensity of these sensations (of matter) as little and unimportant as we wish; but the hypothesis of their existence is, according to my conviction, a necessary condition, in order to comprehend the really existing phenomena of sensation in nature." Only we shall do well to choose the first alternative for the present, and, with DuBois-Reymond, answer the question as to the explanation of the origin of sensation with an "_ignoramus_"; indeed, we shall take a surer road with his "_ignorabimus_" than by a plunge into that bottomless ocean of hypotheses--in spite of the protest of Haeckel, who (Anthrop., page XXI) sees that scientist who has the courage to admit the limits of our knowledge, on account of this "_ignorabimus_", walking in the army of the "black International", and "marshalled under the black flag of the hierarchy," together with "spiritual servitude and falsehood, want of reason and barbarism, superstition and retrogression", and fighting, "spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress." For a solution of the question which simply denies all sharply-marked differences in the world, and explains {131} the new, which comes into existence with sensation, by the assertion that this new element is not new, but was already present, and that it exists everywhere, only we do not see it everywhere,--such a solution seems to us not to be the true way to interpret the problem of the sphinx. Even Ed. von Hartmann seems to