Thus it is that past experience of the nature of mind leads to the inference that no mind has existed from all eternity _in solitude_, but that there is _more than one eternal, uncreated mind_, and that all their powers of enjoyment from giving and receiving happiness in social relations have been in exercise from eternal ages. This is the just and natural deduction of reason and experience, as truly as the deduction that there is at least one eternal First Cause. It has been argued that the _unity of design_ in the works of nature proves that there is but one creating mind. This is not so, for in all our experience of the creations of finite beings no _great design_ was ever formed without a combination of minds, both to plan and to execute. The majority of minds in all ages, both heathen and Christian, have always conceived of the Creator as _in some way_ existing so as to involve the ideas of plurality and of the love and communion of one mind with another. Without a revelation, also, we have the means of arriving at the conclusion that the Creator of all things is not only a mind organized just like our own, but that he always has and always will feel and act right. We infer this from both his social and his moral constitution; for he must, as our own minds do, desire the love, reverence, and confidence of his creatures. The fact that he has made them to love truth, justice, benevolence, and self-sacrificing virtue is evidence that he has and will exhibit these and all other excellences that call forth affection. But we have still stronger evidence. We have seen all the causes that experience has taught as the leading to the wrong action of mind. These are necessarily excluded from our conceptions of the Creator. The Eternal Mind can not err for want of knowledge, nor for want of habits of right action, nor for want of teachers and educators, nor for want of those social influences which generate and sustain a right governing purpose; for an infinite mind, that never had a beginning, can not have these modes of experience which appertain to new-born and finite creatures. Again: we have seen that it is one of the implanted principles of reason that "no rational mind will choose evil without hope of compensating good." Such is the eternal system of the universe, as we learn it by the light of reason, that the highest possible happiness to each individual mind and to the whole commonwealth is promoted by the right action of every mind in that system. This, of necessity, is seen and felt by the All-creating and Eternal Mind, and to suppose that, with this knowledge, he would ever choose wrong is to suppose that he would choose pure evil, and this is contrary to an intuitive truth. It is to suppose the Creator would do what he has formed our minds to believe to be impossible in _any_ rational mind. It is to suppose that the Creator would do that which, if done by human beings, marks them as insane. CHAPTER XXIX.