I. The conscious or unconscious purpose of the religious sentiment, as I have shown in the last chapter, is the _fruition of a wish_, the success of which depends upon unknown power. The votary asks help where he cannot help himself. He expects it through an exertion of power, through an efficient cause. Obviously therefore, he is acting on the logical idea of Causality. This underlies and is essential to the simplest prayer. He extends it, moreover, out of the limits of experience into the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the analogy of observation into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he does believe that the will of God is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is right; at any rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding volition as a co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions which most concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act extended itself to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word for God θεος from a root which gives the meaning “to set in order,” and the Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, _Regin_.[90-1] Thus the abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all religious thought. Let us examine its meaning. Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have been of the relations of “cause and effect.” Startled by the criticisms of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguishing between two spheres of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at first included the “principle of sufficient reason’[TN-6] in the laws of thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools, Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but “uniformity of sequence.”