When we enter the domain of science, we at once realize that a different conception of agency is held. The universe is regarded as a closed system of causal {118} relations which spring from the nature of its parts. It is a systematic and self-contained world whose activities can be explained by the discovery of laws which constantly hold and which grow out of the stable properties of nature itself. As the result of a close and accurate study of the various aspects of nature, science has come to the conclusion that the large bulk of the world is lifeless and that its parts react in habitual or mechanical ways which are invariable. The planets circle about the sun in accordance with the pull and haul of forces which work in the same direction from year to year and lead to the same mathematically describable result. By means of measurements and calculations, celestial mechanics has been able to predict eclipses centuries ahead and to test historical records in regard to those which happened thousands of years ago. The paths of comets have been calculated and their return to the solar system foretold. Thus the mass-movements of the universe have been seen to be mechanical in nature and expressive solely of the energies and configurations distributed throughout its parts. The events which happen are inevitable and arise out of the impersonal agency of spatially existent things. In what sharp contrast is this view of nature to the interpretation primitive man made for himself when he read his own emotions and desires into the things around him. Caprice and whim have no place in this regular procession of the heavens. Impersonal agency conquered, not only in man's conception of the larger relations of bodies to one another, but also in his idea of those events, like sickness and death, which strike nearer home. While the agencies at work may not be considered mechanical, they are yet {119} seen to be natural and regular in their working. The characteristic of the personal agency to which religion makes appeal is that it disregards space; it works here and there at its own will and leaps across intervening distances as though they had no reality. Just because it is spaceless, it is supernatural. It cannot be localized, and brought into definite relations with other things in the universe. The more we conceive the universe as a spatial, self-contained system of things and processes, the more it excludes the presence of an agency which intervenes in it but is not really of it. So long as events can be explained as the effects of the natural working of things in nature, the assumption of a supernatural agent is unmotived.