The hypothesis which I would oppose to that of the eternal circular process:—Would it be just as possible to explain the laws of the mechanical world as exceptions and seemingly as accidents among the things of the universe, as one possibility only among an incalculable number of possibilities? Would it be possible to regard ourselves as accidentally thrust into this corner of the mechanical universal arrangement?—That all chemical philosophy is likewise an exception and an accident in the world’s economy, and finally that organic life is a mere exception and accident in the chemical world? Should we have to assume as the most general form of existence a world which was not yet mechanical, which was outside all mechanical laws (although accessible to them)?—and that as a matter of fact this world would be the most general now and for evermore, so that the origin of the mechanical world would be a lawless game which would ultimately acquire such consistency as the organic laws seem to have now from our point of view? So that all our mechanical laws would be not eternal, but evolved, and would have survived innumerable different mechanical laws, or that they had attained supremacy in isolated corners of the world and not in others?—It would seem that we need caprice, actual lawlessness, and only a capacity for law, a primeval state of stupidity which is not even able to concern itself with mechanics? The origin of qualities presupposes the existence of quantities, and these, for their part, might arise from a thousand kinds of mechanical processes.