The majority of people might suppose this a conclusive inference from Nature to the Being of a Personal God. But Professor Powell does not so intend it; and therefore some readers may feel disposed to blame his use of words. It is, however, only fair that before so doing, they should carefully consider his whole mode of apprehending the subject in its completeness. And the easiest way of understanding Powell is, most probably, to compare him with Paley. The latter is confident that when he has derived the design and arrangement of the world from a mind analogous to the mind of man, but immeasurably vast as the Universe which man inhabits,--little more need be said. He thinks the infinite intelligence thus demonstrated, is clearly no other than the Great First Cause, and Creator of all things. "Contrivance, if established, appears to me to prove everything which we wish to prove." This sentence begins Chap. xxiii., and the rest of Paley's Natural Theology is intended to demonstrate and verify its correctness. Powell thinks that the step from a mind or intelligence, even if conceived illimitable as the Universe, to a First Cause, Supreme Mind, or Moral Cause, is a very much longer ascent[p] than Paley thought it. By these latter terms he meant--as Paley did--the Divine Personality believed in by Theists, and evidenced, _first_, as mind by a reign of law, order, and arrangement, so far as the world can evidence Him;--but manifest, _secondly_, in His higher nature as the fountain and originator of law--that is, a true Cause, a manifestation due to the causal structure of our own human minds. The point of difference is the length of the step to be taken from Law to Causation; but Powell agrees with his predecessor in asserting it, though arduous, to be absolutely safe. The point he insists on is that we cannot take it by a contemplation of the world without us only. "Ever-present _mind_" he says,[21] "is a direct inference from the universal order of nature, or rather only another mode of expressing it. But of the _mode_ of existence of that mind we can infer nothing." From this view he draws conclusions in opposite directions. Pantheism,[22] the co-existence or identification of mind with matter, "is at best a mere gratuitous hypothesis, and as such wholly unphilosophical in itself, and leading to many preposterous consequences." There are also grounds on which Theism appears certain and Pantheism extravagant, absurd, and contradictory.[23] To see these grounds we are to carry out the analogy given us by the common characteristics of order, adjustment, and interdependence visible through their effects as in the human workshop or laboratory, so, too, in the vast illimitable Universe, and described in our second extract as manifestations of Mind or invisible Intelligence. In the paragraph immediately following that extract,[24] he continues:--