atom has its atmosphere of ether, or something else, and whatever other similar fancies there may be. The fancies of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and its disciples were for the most part ingenious, lofty, or at least witty; but these, on the contrary, are clumsy, insipid, paltry, and awkward, the production of minds which, in the first place, are unable to think any other reality than a fabulous, qualityless matter, which is also an absolute object, _i.e._, an object without a subject; and secondly can think of no other activity than motion and impact: these two alone are comprehensible to them, and that everything runs back to these is their _a priori_ assumption; for these are their _thing in itself_. To attain this end the vital force is reduced to chemical forces (which are insidiously and unjustifiably called molecular forces), and all processes of unorganised nature to mechanism, _i.e._, to action and reaction. And thus at last the whole world and everything in it becomes merely a piece of mechanical ingenuity, like the toys worked by levers, wheels, and sand, which represent a mine or the work on a farm. The source of the evil is, that through the amount of hand‐work which experimenting requires the head‐work of thinking has been allowed to get out of practice. The crucible and the voltaic pile are supposed to assume its functions; hence also the profound abhorrence of all philosophy. But the matter might be put in this way. One might say that materialism, as it has hitherto appeared, has only failed because it did not adequately _know_ the matter out of which it thought to construct the world, and therefore was dealing, not with matter itself, but with a propertyless substitute for it. If, on the contrary, instead of this, it had taken the actual and _empirically_ given matter (_i.e._, material substance, or rather substances), endowed as it is with all physical, chemical, electrical properties, and also with the power of spontaneously producing life out of itself, thus the true _mater rerum_, from the obscurity of whose womb all phenomena and forms come forth, to fall back into it some time again; from this, _i.e._, from matter fully comprehended and exhaustively known, a world might have been constructed of which materialism would not need to be ashamed. Quite true: only the trick would then consist in this, that the _Quæsita_ had been placed in the _Data_, for professedly what was taken as given, and made the starting‐point of the deduction, was mere matter, but really it included all the mysterious forces of nature which cling to it, or more correctly, by means of it become visible to us, much the same as if under the name of the dish we understand what lies upon it. For in fact, for our knowledge, matter is really merely the _vehicle_ of the qualities and natural forces, which appear as its accidents, and just because I have traced these back to the will I call matter the mere _visibility of the will_. Stripped of all