It cannot be said that Kant’s attempted answer to such a defence of the Design Argument is quite conclusive. In § 90 of the _Methodology_ (p. 399) he pleads that though it is perfectly legitimate to argue by analogy from our own minds to the minds of other men,--nay further, although we may conclude from those actions of the lower animals which display plan, that they are not, as Descartes alleged, mere machines--yet it is not legitimate to conclude from the apparent presence of design in the operations of nature that a conscious mind directs those operations. For, he argues, that in comparing the actions of men and the lower animals, or in comparing the actions of one man with those of another, we are not pressing our analogy beyond the limits of experience. Men and beasts alike are finite living beings, subject to the limitations of finite existence; and hence the law which governs the one series of operations may be regarded by analogy as sufficiently explaining the other series. But the power at the basis of Nature is utterly above definition or comprehension, and we are going beyond our legitimate province if we venture to ascribe to it a mode of operation with which we are only conversant in the case of beings subject to the conditions of space and time. He urges in short that when speaking about man and his mind we thoroughly understand what we are talking about; but in speaking of the Mind of Deity we are dealing with something of which we have no experience, and of which therefore we have no right to predicate anything. But it is apparent that, as has been pointed out, even when we infer the existence of another finite mind from certain observed operations, we are making an inference about something which is as mysterious an _x_ as anything can be. Mind is not a thing that is subject to the laws and conditions of the world of sense; it is “_in_ the world but not _of_ the world.” And so to infer the existence of the mind of any individual except myself is a quite different kind of inference from that by which, for example, we infer the presence of an electro-magnet in a given field. The action of the latter we understand to a large extent; but we do not understand the action of mind, which yet we know from daily experience of ourselves does produce effects in the phenomenal world, often permanent and important effects. Briefly, the action of mind upon matter (to use the ordinary phraseology for the sake of clearness) is--we may assume for our present purpose--an established fact. Hence the causality of mind is a _vera causa_; we bring it in to account for the actions of other human beings, and by precisely the same process of reasoning we invoke it to explain the operations of nature.