2. Another school is represented by such men as Professors Owen, Huxley, and Baden Powell, who deny the ultimate distinction between matter and force, and regard both as phenomenal manifestations of some "unknown substratum"--a supramaterial PHYSIS (φύσις) which is identical with the Divine substance, the _natura naturans_ of Spinoza. To these minds the universe discloses nothing but immutable law, absolute continuity, and necessary development. "The grand principle of the _self-evolving powers of nature_"[229] and "the grand inductive conclusion of universal and _eternal_ order,"[230] are the bases of all rational theology. Here we encounter a phase of thought which verges toward the extreme of Pantheism. The Deity himself is conditioned in his action by the eternal and immutable laws of nature, and can not be conceived as a living Will exercising control over and subordinating these laws to higher moral ideas and ends. This doctrine, Prof. Powell admits, "summarily overrides the Mosaic creation, renders miracles irrational, excludes a special providence, and, we may add, dismisses prayer as a useless absurdity." 3. A third and intermediate school assumes the existence of a plastic nature (_vis formativa_) intermediate between the Creator and his work, by which the phenomena of nature are produced. This hypothesis was propounded by Cudworth, and has lately been reproduced by Dr. Laycock and Mr. Murphy under the name of "unconscious organizing intelligence," to explain those facts of organic nature which come under the relation of means and ends, or structure and function. This hypothesis must deflect toward one or other of the extremes indicated, when it attempts to decide in what subject this "unconscious intelligence" inheres. If it be said that it inheres in matter, the tendency must be toward Atheism: that it inheres in spirit, then the tendency is toward Pantheism. Common to all these hypotheses is the denial of the direct, immediate, and voluntary agency of God in nature as _the only real and efficient force_. They are all attempts to account for the conservation of the world by "the conservation and transformation of energy," that is, by secondary causes, which in reality are only conditions and not real causes. They interpose a chasm between God and the world. The universe is a self-supporting, self-evolving machine, and God is an isolated, incommunicable abstraction.