SOPHEREUS. I answer you as I have before--that the agencies which you call phenomenal causes could not have established themselves; could not have originated their own uniformity; could not have made the invariable connection between themselves and the effects. If we discard the idea of a moral and sentient being, a mind originating and ordaining the physical agencies, we have nothing left but those agencies; and in this the human mind can not rest. It is not enough to say that it ought to rest there. It does not, will not, and can not. Science--what you call science--may rest there, but philosophy can not. It is unphilosophical to speak of the Unknown Cause, or the Unknown Power, underlying all manifestations, as something of which we can not conceive and must not personify. The ultimate power which underlies all phenomena necessarily implies a will, an intellectual origin, and a mental energy. That it is something whose mental operations we can not trace, is no argument against its personality, and no reason why we should not conceive of it as a mental energy. KOSMICOS. You have more than once referred to the constitution of the human mind as if it had been constructed with an irresistible necessity to attribute everything to the action of a being, an intelligence, and a will. You should rather say that _some minds_ have trained themselves to this mode of reasoning, because they have first received the idea of such a being as the final cause, as a matter of dogmatic teaching, and they have tried to reason it out so as to attain a conviction that what they have been taught is true. It is in this way that they have found what they consider as evidence of a moral purpose. But you have no warrant for the assumption that the human intellect has been put together in such a way that it can not avoid reaching the conclusion that all phenomena are to be imputed to the volition of a mind as their producing cause.