Such a separation is not to be sought from a writer of Paley's date, when the modern notion of law was unformed, or rather was in process of formation. Thus Newton's discoveries were thought by many persons irreligious, because the stability of the heavens appeared like something necessarily determined. Respecting this opinion, Powell observes (and from his point of view with truth), that "such necessity of reason is the highest proof of design." Paley, on the contrary, felt inclined to despair of discovering much evidence of Design in Astronomy, but he looked upon the starry heavens as affording the most ample and glorious confirmation of the agency of an intelligent Creator, when proved from some other source. In his next chapter (the 23rd) he proceeds to reprehend the mistaken sense of law, growing up amongst physicists in his own day. "It will," he says, "be made to take the place of power, and still more, of intelligent power," and will "be assigned for the cause of anything or of any property of anything that exists." In this remark he shows his accustomed penetration. Law, antecedent and consequent, with their series of physical evolutions, have been talked of by men who confuse physics and metaphysics, as if they could thereby account for a whole universe.[30] Now, from this cloudy confusion[r], Professor Powell is exempt. He accepts (as obviously he must accept) the natural-science idea of law, which looks at it as an orderly expression of force, and tells us that "law and order, physical causation and uniformity of action are the elevated manifestations of Divinity, creation and providence."[31] But from the conception of Mind or Intelligence thus given us, which, though invisible to the eye, is yet, in its effects, plainly visible, he distinguishes, over and over again, the idea of a true originating first Cause.[32] We see the necessity of a moral Cause as distinguished from a physical antecedent, when we survey Nature. But Nature does not contain the idea in an explicit shape. She only necessitates its acceptance. This idea, we find, he tells us, manifest in our own moral nature,--by analogy we discern it in the Divine. He likewise severely blames those who commingle in words the two contrasted thoughts and lines of inference, and mentions Coleridge and Sterling[33] by way of example. As concerns his own mode of establishing the idea of causation in its proper and peculiar force, Professor Powell agrees with a large number of metaphysicians, ancient and modern. It might seem superfluous to name as an instance the late Dean Mansel, were not a passage in his "Prolegomena" so full of good matter on the topic.[34]