Note 100 — Chapter III · THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

It is not superfluous to add that there is nothing of the causal kind in these pure phenomena of “Living Nature.” Materialism, in order to get a system for the pedestrian reasoner, has had to adulterate the picture of them with fitness-causes. But Goethe—who anticipated just about as much of Darwinism as there will be left of it in fifty years from Darwin—absolutely excluded the causality-principle. And the very fact that the Darwinians quite failed to notice its absence is a clear indication that Goethe’s “Living Nature” belongs to actual life, "cause"-less and "aim"-less; for the idea of the prime-phenomenon does not involve causal assumptions of any sort unless it has been misunderstood in advance in a mechanistic sense.