"The utter futility of such inferences is at once seen, when the smallest attention is given to the plain distinctions above laid down between 'moral' and 'physical' causation; and to the proper force of the conclusions from natural science establishing the former by means of the latter. "This distinction obviously points to the _very reverse_ of the assertion that physical action is identical with its moral cause; the essential difference and contrast between them is the very point which the whole argument upholds and enforces. "Of all forms of philosophical mysticism, the idea of Pantheism seems to me one of the most extravagant. Ever-present _mind_ 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. "To assert, then, that this universally manifested mind is _co-existent_, or even to be _identified_, with _matter_, is at best a mere gratuitous hypothesis, and as such wholly unphilosophical in itself, and leading to many preposterous consequences. But if further supposed to apply in any higher sense as to an object of worship, trust, love, obedience, or the like (as is implied in the term Pan_theism_), it appears to involve moral contradictions of the most startling kind. "There are, however, many who, though rejecting Pantheism as _untrue_, do not conceive it _absurd_ or _contradictory_. Much, however, will, in all such cases, depend on the precise _sense_ in which it is maintained. With some it seems to have been upheld on a fanciful analogy with the conception of the human frame animated by an indwelling spirit; as if in a somewhat similar manner the supreme mind might animate nature. Without disputing this in a certain sense, the cases surely cannot be considered at all parallel: we do not infer the existence of the human mind, from the arrangement and adaptation of the bodily organs, nor is it the moral cause of their organisation. "If Pantheism were asserted merely in the sense of a kind of vital or animating principle pervading the material world, I would admit that such an idea involves _no absurdity_, or _contradiction_, but still I should regard it as visionary and unphilosophical. I could but class it with the 'vital forces' which Kepler fancied necessary for keeping up the motions of the planets, with the 'plastic powers of nature,' 'her abhorrence of a vacuum,' and the like chimæras. But it is when men elevate such a supposed animating principle into a _Deity_, a being of supreme wisdom, power, beneficence, and goodness, yet residing in every atom of matter, and _participating directly_ in every form and case of material action, that the contradiction arises." _Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy_, pp. 176-9. E.--THE EXTENT AND DIVISIONS OF THE SCIENCE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY.