Till Kant came there was a real dilemma between materialism and theism, _i.e._, between the assumption that a blind chance, or that an intelligence working from without in accordance with purposes and conceptions, had brought about the world, _neque dabatur tertium_. Therefore atheism and materialism were the same; hence the doubt whether there really could be an atheist, _i.e._, a man who really could attribute to blind chance the disposition of nature, so full of design, especially organised nature. See, for example, Bacon’s Essays (_sermones fideles_), Essay 16, on Atheism. In the opinion of the great mass of men, and of the English, who in such things belong entirely to the great mass (the mob), this is still the case, even with their most celebrated men of learning. One has only to look at Owen’s “_Ostéologie Comparée_,” of 1855, preface, p. 11, 12, where he stands always before the old dilemma between Democritus and Epicurus on the one side, and an intelligence on the other, in which _la connaissance __ d’un être tel que l’homme a existé avant que l’homme fit son apparition_. All design must have proceeded from an _intelligence_; he has never even dreamt of doubting this. Yet in the lecture based upon this now modified preface, delivered in the _Académie des Sciences_ on the 5th September 1853, he says, with childish naivete: “_La téléologie, ou la théologie scientifique_” (_Comptes Rendus_, Sept. 1853), that is for him precisely the same thing! Is anything in nature designed? then it is a work of intention, of reflection, of intelligence. Yet, certainly, what has such an Englishman and the _Académie des Sciences_ to do with the “Critique of Judgment,” or, indeed, with my book upon the Will in Nature? These gentlemen do not see so far below them. These _illustres confrères_ disdain metaphysics and the _philosophie allemande_: they confine themselves to the old woman’s philosophy. The validity of that disjunctive major, that dilemma between materialism and theism, rests, however, upon the assumption that the present given world is the world of things in themselves; that consequently there is no other order of things than the empirical. But after the world and its order had through Kant become mere phenomenon, the laws of which rest principally upon the forms of our intellect, the existence and nature of things and of the world no longer required to be explained according to the analogy of the changes perceived or effected by us in the world; nor must that which we comprehend as means and end have necessarily arisen as the consequence of a similar knowledge. Thus, inasmuch as Kant, through his important distinction between phenomenon and thing in itself, withdrew the foundation from theism, he opened, on the other hand, the way to entirely different and more profound explanations of existence.