VII. Modern Man and His World Conception

> The time should have come . . . to establish a theory of origin of organic species that is not based solely on one-sidedly proclaimed theorems from descriptive natural science, but is also in agreement with the other natural laws that are at the same time the laws of human thinking. What is necessary is a theory that is free from all hypothesizing and that rests solely on strict conclusions from natural scientific observations in the widest sense of the word; a theory that saves the concept of the species according to the actual possibility, but at the same time adapts Darwin's concept of evolution to its own field and tries to make it fruitful. The center of this new theory is man, the species unique on our planet: Homo sapiens. It is strange that the older observers began with the objects of nature and then went astray to such an extent that they did not find the way that leads to the human being. This aim had been attained by Darwin only in an insufficient and unsatisfactory way as he sought the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals, while the naturalist should begin with himself as a human being in order to proceed through the entire realm of existence and of thinking and to return finally to humanity. . . . It was not by accident that the human nature resulted from the entire terrestrial evolution, but by necessity. Man is the aim of all telluric processes and every other form that occurs beside him has borrowed its traits from him. Man is the first-born being of the entire cosmos. . . . When his germinating state (man in his potentiality) had come into being, the remaining organic substance no longer had the power to produce further human possibilities. What developed thereafter became animal or plan. . . .