Much more unsuitable, however, is the way in which so‐called pantheists express themselves, whose whole philosophy consists chiefly in this, that they call the inner nature of the world, which is unknown to them, “God;” by which indeed they imagine they have achieved much. According to this, then, the world would be a theophany. But let one only look at it: this world of constantly needy creatures, who continue for a time only by devouring one another, fulfil their existence in anxiety and want, and often suffer terrible miseries, till at last they fall into the arms of death; whoever distinctly looks upon this will allow that Aristotle was right in saying: “ἡ φυσις δαιομονια, αλλ᾽ ου θεια εστι” (_Natura dæmonia est, non divina_), _De divinat._, c. 2, p. 463; nay, he will be obliged to confess that a God who could think of changing Himself into such a world as this must certainly have been tormented by the devil. I know well that the pretended philosophers of this century follow Spinoza in this, and think themselves thereby justified. But Spinoza had special reasons for thus naming his one substance, in order, namely, to preserve at least the word, although not the thing. The stake of Giordano Bruno and of Vanini was still fresh in the memory; they also had been sacrificed to that God for whose honour incomparably more human sacrifices have bled than on the altars of all heathen gods of both hemispheres together. If, then, Spinoza calls the world God, it is exactly the same thing as when Rousseau in the “_Contrat social_,” constantly and throughout denotes the people by the word _le souverain_; we might also compare it with this, that once a prince who intended to abolish the nobility in his land, in order to rob no one of his own, hit upon the idea of ennobling all his subjects. Those philosophers of our day have certainly one other ground for the nomenclature we are speaking of, but it is no more substantial. In their philosophising they all start, not from the world or our consciousness of it, but from God, as something given and known; He is not their _quæsitum_, but their _datum_. If they were boys I would then explain to them that this is a _petitio principii_, but they know this as well as I do. But since Kant has shown that the path of the earlier dogmatism, which proceeded honestly, the path from the world to a God, does not lead there, these gentlemen now imagine they have found a fine way of escape and made it cunningly. Will the reader of a later age pardon me for detaining him with persons of whom he has never heard.