In speaking of the principle of vegetable life, Sir James Edward Smith, the eminent botanist, says, "I humbly conceive that, if the human understanding can in any case flatter itself with obtaining, in the natural world, a glimpse of the _immediate agency_ of the Deity, it is in the contemplation of this _vital principle_, which seems independent of material organization, and an impulse, of his own divine energy."--_Introduction to Botany_, p. 26, (Boston edition.) "We would no way be understood," says Sir John Herschel, "to deny the constant exercise of this [God's] direct power in maintaining the system of nature, or the ultimate emanation of every energy, which material agents exert, from his immediate will, acting in conformity with his own laws."--_Discourse on Nat. Philosophy._ "A law," says Professor Whewell, "supposes an agent and a power; for it is the mode according to which the agent proceeds, the order according to which the power acts. Without the presence of such an agent, of such a power, conscious of the relations on which the law depends, producing the effects which the law prescribes, the law can have no efficiency, no existence. Hence we infer that the intelligence by which the law is ordained, the power by which it is put in action, must be present at all times and in all places where the effects of the law occur; that thus the knowledge and the agency of the divine Being pervades every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence and change. The laws of nature are the laws which He, in his wisdom, prescribes to his own acts; his universal presence is the necessary condition of any course of events; his universal agency the only origin of any efficient force."--_Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 270. "The student in natural philosophy," observes the Bishop of London, "will find rest from all those perplexities, which are occasioned by the obscurity of causation, in the proposition which, although it was discredited by the patronage of Malebranche and the Cartesians, has been adopted by Clarke and Dugald Stewart, and which is by far the most simple and sublime account of the matter--that all events which are continually taking place in the different parts of the material universe are the _immediate_ effects of the divine agency."--_Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise_, p. 273.