Religion of itself, unadulterated by foreign elements, knows nothing of the existence of second causes; on the contrary, they are a stone of stumbling to it; for the realm of second causes, the sensible world, Nature, is precisely what separates man from God, although God as a real God, i.e., an external being, is supposed himself to become in the other world a sensible existence. [155] Hence religion believes that one day this wall of separation will fall away. One day there will be no Nature, no matter, no body, at least none such as to separate man from God: then there will be only God and the pious soul. Religion derives the idea of the existence of second causes, that is, of things which are interposed between God and man, only from the physical, natural, and hence the irreligious or at least non-religious theory of the universe: a theory which it nevertheless immediately subverts by making the operations of Nature operations of God. But this religious idea is in contradiction with the natural sense and understanding, which concedes a real, spontaneous activity to natural things. And this contradiction of the physical view with the religious theory, religion resolves by converting the undeniable activity of things into an activity of God. Thus, on this view, the positive idea is God; the negative, the world. On the contrary, where second causes, having been set in motion, are, so to speak, emancipated, the converse occurs; Nature is the positive, God a negative idea. The world is independent in its existence, its persistence; only as to its commencement is it dependent. God is here only a hypothetical Being, an inference, arising from the necessity of a limited understanding, to which the existence of a world viewed by it as a machine is inexplicable without a self-moving principle;--he is no longer an original, absolutely necessary Being. God exists not for his own sake, but for the sake of the world,--merely that he may, as a First Cause, explain the existence of the world. The narrow rationalising man takes objection to the original self-subsistence of the world, because he looks at it only from the subjective, practical point of view, only in its commoner aspect, only as a piece of mechanism, not in its majesty and glory, not as the Cosmos. He conceives the world as having been launched into existence by an original impetus, as, according to mathematical theory, is the case with matter once set in motion and thenceforth going on for ever: that is, he postulates a mechanical origin. A machine must have a beginning; this is involved in its very idea; for it has not the source of motion in itself.