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 246 condemn him eternally for so doing—who is not what we mean when we call a man good.

He expresses himself more fully in his posthumous Essays on Religion (1847). He denies that he can infer an omniscient, omnipotent, and absolutely good Creator from the facts of nature. He regards it possible however on the other hand to believe in a personal God, who, in constant conflict with uncreated and persistently resistant matter, is seeking to bring about a beneficent order of nature. Man can therefore, by his own effort, be a co-laborer with God, and, according to Mill, the real religious attitude consists in the sentiment aroused by this fellowship. He attaches great importance to the fact that such thoughts and sentiments elevate man above the limitations of experience and the prosiness of ordinary life.

About the middle of the nineteenth century the theory of evolution came into vogue and was recognized as an essential element of human thought. The romantic philosophy had indeed likewise spoken of evolution, but they simply meant by this a purely logical or systematic relation of the forms and types of being, not a real process, taking place in time. The idea of evolution had already made itself felt however in various departments of thought. Thus, e. g., in the astronomical hypothesis of Kant and Laplace, in the theory of epigenesis (i. e. the theory of the gradual evolution of the embryo from a simple rudiment) as formulated by the anatomist, Caspar Wolff, in the psychology of Spinoza, Hartley and James Mill, in the eighteenth century belief in the evolution of history, in Comte's theory of the three stages. Lamarck