In the _first stage_ we can see, as we look back, that the Religious feeling was dominant, while the scientific temper could scarcely have been said to exist; certainly it did not exist upon any extended scale. But, though the desire to be reverent was widespread, we are bound to allow that the ideas about God were somewhat crudely conceived. As a legacy, no doubt, from the Deistic controversies of the preceding century, the general thought did not rise above the notion of a Supreme Mechanist and all-powerful Ruler of all things. The Divine Being was regarded as having originated the universe by a fiat of His will, fashioning its several contents one after another as He pleased, and appointing that each and all should be subjected to the laws He had ordained; always reserving to Himself the right to intervene by some signal display of wisdom and power, when such intervention was required, either to remedy a defect, or yet further to set forth His glory. Men were very ready to admit the idea of the Supernatural, but it was in the merely superficial and popular sense of _power working without means_, rather than what we now {100} feel to be the far truer sense of _superhuman knowledge of means, and power to use them_.[1] It followed, and this was the weakest point in the Paleyan system of Natural Theology, that God's action was looked for not in the normal, but in the exceptional processes of Nature. The need of the Divine was only felt when no other explanation was forthcoming; with the result, of course, that as other explanations were found, the necessity for recognising its operation grew ever less and less. And, even apart from such a consequence, the effects of the conception could not be otherwise than injurious to religious faith; for, as it has been truly and reverently observed, "a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence."[2] As to knowledge of the World, there was scarcely any at all, according in our present understanding of such knowledge. Not everybody, of course, accounted for the existence of fossils by supposing that they were the casts from which the Almighty had designed His creatures, or possibly the Devil's {101} attempts to imitate His works; but the prevailing ideas were of the most primitive kind. Even Paley could give us no better explanation of certain rudimentary anatomical organs, than by suggesting that the creature in whom they were found had been so far constructed before it was decided what its sex should be! We can see that if any real progress in knowledge was to be made, a change of a very radical order had to come. And it did come.