Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/353

 it is a mere matter of chance whether or not the organic finds the conditions of existence in what confronts it. So far as the form of what essentially constitutes the conception is concerned, we have to remark that inorganic Nature is what comes first, is what is immediate. It was in harmony with the childlike ideas of the Mosaic age that the heavens and the earth, light, and so on, should have been thought of as created first, while the organic appeared later in point of time. The question is this: Is that the true definition or essential nature of the notion of the inorganic, and do living things and Man represent what is dependent? Philosophy, on the other hand, explains the truth involved in the definition of the notion; and apart from this, Man is certain that he is related to the rest of Nature as an end, and that Nature is meant to be a means so far as he is concerned, and that this represents the relation in which the inorganic in general stands to the organic. The organic is in its formal aspect, and by its very nature, something which exists in accordance with an end. It is means and end, and is therefore something infinite in itself. It is an end which returns back into itself; and even regarded as something dependent on what is outside of it, it has the character of an end, and consequently it represents what is truly first in comparison with what has been termed the immediate, in comparison, that is, with Nature. This immediacy is merely one-sided determination, and ought to be brought down to the level of something that is merely posited. This is the true relation. Man is not an accident added on to what is first; but, on the contrary, the organic is itself what is first. The inorganic has in it merely the semblance of Being. This relation is logically developed in Science itself.

This relation, however, still involves an element of separation, as seen in the fact that the organic, regarded from one side, is related outwardly to inorganic Nature,