the phenomena of Nature imply that some authority has said, from the beginning, Thus far shalt thou go and no farther? You surely do not imagine that the law of universal gravitation made itself, or that it settled itself into an exact and invariable method of action by the mere force of habit, beginning without prescribed and superimposed limits, and finally resulting in a fixed rule which never changes. You do not imagine that the mysterious, impalpable motion to which is now given the name of electricity, created for itself, as a matter of habit, the perpetual tendency to seek an equilibration of the quantity accumulated in one body with the quantity that is contained in another, by transmission through intermediate bodies; or that it established for itself the conditions which make one substance a better conducting medium than another. You do not suppose, I take it, that certain particles of matter adopted for themselves a capacity to arrange themselves in crystals of certain fixed combinations and shapes, and that other particles of matter did not choose to take on this habit. All these forces, powers, and tendencies are of very great extent, much beyond any that man can exercise; but they all have their limitations, their prescribed and invariable methods of action; they all act as if they have been commanded to act in a certain way and to a certain extent, and not as if they have chosen for themselves both method and scope. Now, is it not a rational deduction that what is really illimitable is not the power of Nature, but the power which made Nature what it is? Is it not a necessary conclusion that, inasmuch as all Nature acts within certain limits, stupendous and minute and varied as the products or effects may be, there must have been behind Nature a power that could and did prescribe the methods, the limitations, the lines within which Nature was to move and act? You can not put into the mouth of Nature the question, Where wast thou (Man) when I laid the foundations of the world? without suggesting the retort, "Where wast _thou_ (Nature) when the foundations of the world _were_ laid?" And this question Nature can no more answer, for itself, than man can answer for himself when the question is put to him. Each must answer, I was nowhere--I did not exist. Each must answer, There was a power which called me into being, which prescribed the conditions of my existence, which gave me the capacities that I possess, which ordained the limitations within which I was to act. KOSMICOS. And all this you derive from the fact that a being whom we call Man has some power over matter; that he has an intelligent faculty by which he can do certain things with matter, and that he actually does produce certain concrete forms of new things that he did not find made to his hand. Is this the basis of your reasoning about the origin of Nature?