So it is that, as Professors Stewart and Tait have told us, we must conceive of Him as not the Creator only, but likewise the Upholder of all things, while Lord Kelvin declares[325] we are unmistakably shown through Nature that she depends upon one "ever-acting Creator and Ruler." It is in this omnipresence of Divine influence that Monism finds the modicum of plausibility which serves it for a foundation. It runs, indeed, into the absurdity of endeavouring to explain such Omnipresence by identifying the finite with the Infinite, and attributing to matter qualities which all experience, and very specially all scientific experience, contradicts; but, for all that, it scores a distinct point as against mere materialism, which Comte declares to be "the most illogical form of metaphysics," and the late Sir Leslie Stephen, "not so much error as sheer nonsense." Theism avoids the error of either extreme. While it teaches the essential and fundamental distinction between the Absolute and the contingent, between the Creator and His creatures, it teaches likewise that He is ever present in His works, and that in their every operation He is manifested. And so, in the words of Rivarol, God is the explanation of the world, and the world is the demonstration of God. The acceptance of a Self-existent, All-powerful, and intelligent Being can alone serve as a basis for any system of Cosmogony which satisfies our intellectual need of causation; while, on the other hand, the nature of this Being, as necessarily beyond the scope of our senses, can be known to us only indirectly through the effects of which He is the cause. By no one has this conclusion been more clearly stated than by Lamarck, the real father of Organic Evolutionism, whom many would therefore represent as an atheist. His words are so much to the point that with them we may conclude.[326] Of the Supreme Being, in a word of God, to whom all infinitude is seen to belong, man has thus conceived an idea, which, though indirect, is sound, and which necessarily follows from what he observes. In the same manner, he has formed another idea, equally solid, namely of the boundless power of this Being, suggested by the consideration of His works.... Nature not being intelligent, nor even a being, but an order of things constituting a power subject to law, cannot therefore be God. She is the wondrous product of His Almighty will: and for us, of all created things she is the grandest and most admirable. Thus the will of God is everywhere expressed by the laws of Nature, since these laws originate from Him. APPENDIX _A._ _Evolution and the lower forms of life_ (_p. 165_).