Whereas we can act on the external world only through our muscles; in ourselves we are aware of things belonging to a totally different category, with which muscle and movement and energy appear to have nothing to do,—such things as thought, purpose, desire, humour, affection, consciousness, will. These mental faculties seem intimately associated with, and are displayed by, our bodily mechanism; but in themselves they belong to a different order of being,—an order which employs and dominates the material, while immersed or immanent in it. Every purposed movement is preceded and inspired by thought. Such reasoned control, by indwelling mind, may be undetectable and inconceivable to a low order of intelligence, being totally masked by the material garment; and the purpose underlying our activity may have to be inferred, by such intelligence, with as great difficulty as we feel in detecting indwelling Purpose amid the spontaneous operations of Nature. Nevertheless, whenever our movements are not controlled by thought and intelligent purpose, but are left to chance and random impulses, like the actions of a man whose reason has been unseated, nothing but error and confusion results;—quite a different state of things from anything we observe in the orderly and beautiful procedure of nature. It is sometimes said that the operations of nature are spontaneous; and that is exactly what they are. That is the meaning of immanence. “Spontaneous,” used in this sense, does not mean random and purposeless and undetermined: it means actuated and controlled from within, by something indwelling and all pervading and not absent anywhere. The intelligence which guides things is not something external to the scheme, clumsily interfering with it by muscular action, as we are constrained to do when we interfere at all; but is something within and inseparable from it, as human thought is within and inseparable from the action of our brains. In some partially similar way we conceive that the multifarious processes in nature, with neither the origin nor maintenance of which have we had anything to do, must be guided and controlled by some Thought and Purpose, immanent in everything, but revealed only to those with sufficiently awakened perceptions. Many are blind to the meaning—to the fact even that there is a meaning—in nature; just as an animal is usually blind to a picture, and always to a poem; but to the higher members of our race the Intelligence and Purpose, underlying the whole mystery of existence, elaborating the details of evolution—and ultimately tending to elucidate the frequent discords, the strange humours, and puzzling contradictions of life—are keenly felt. To them the lavish beauty of wild Nature—of landscape, of sunset, of mountain, and of sea—are revelations of an indwelling Presence, rejoicing in its own majestic order. πάντα πλήρη θεῶν.