5. The Beyond of the Senses and the Beyond of the Soul

However, this book “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig” is indeed strange. For while all earlier materialistic interpretations of Darwinism boiled down to saying: We have perfect organisms, we have imperfect organisms; the perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones through their external natural forces, Hertwig comes back to to the fact that in the perfect organism, if one goes back microscopically to the first germ, one can prove that Nägeli's view is correct, that in the first germ the perfect organism is already distinguished from the imperfect organism. For there is already something quite different in the perfect organism than in the imperfect one, which one believes the perfect one has developed from. Microscopic research has gone to a limit, but it has achieved nothing more than to come across a mirror, and has not progressed further than the limit of the sensory world. The consequence will be that many people who stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world view will not merely state, as Hertwig does: the materialistic interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. Rather, they will acknowledge: If we want to arrive at anything that explains the sense world and lies behind it, then we cannot stop at ordinary consciousness; we cannot get out of the sense world, not even with as many telescopes as we want. We can only get out of the sense world if we arm ourselves with the seeing consciousness.