Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/157

Rh least know what I am doing! I do not in the least know what l ought to do." You are right, but be sure of this: you are being done every moment! Mankind, at all times, mistook the active for the passive; it is their everlasting grammatical blunder. —On this mirror—for our intellect is a mirror—something is going on which shows regularity; a certain thing, each time, follows another certain thing. This, if we want to perceive it and give it a line, we call cause and effect. We fools! As if, in this, we understood or could understand anything! For we have seen nothing but the images of " cause and effect." And this very figurativeness makes the insight into a more substantial relation than that of sequence impossible. —Any important investigator who devotes his attention to the history of the eye and its formation in the lowest creatures, and shows the whole gradual genesis of the eye, is bound to arrive at the important result that sight was not at first the purpose of the eye, but much more probably asserted itself when chance had composed the apparatus. A single instance of this kind suffices to open our eyes as to the fallacy of “purposes" in nature.