thomed, but throughout which he is assured the same recondite and
immutable arrangement ever prevails.

"That which requires thought and reason to understand must be itself
thought and reason. That which mind alone can investigate or express must
be itself mind. And if the highest conception attained is but partial, then
the mind and reason studied is greater than the mind and reason of the
student. If the more it be studied the more vast and complex is the
necessary connection in reason disclosed, then the more evident is the vast
extent and compass of the intelligence thus partially manifested, and its
reality, as _existing in the immutably connected order of objects
examined_, independently of the mind of the investigator.

"But considerations of this kind, just and transcendently important as they
are in themselves, give us no aid in any inquiry into the _origin_ of the
order of things thus investigated, or the _nature_ or other attributes of
the mind evinced in them.

"The real argument for universal _intelligence_, manifested in the
universality of order and law in the material world, is very different from
any attempt to give a form to our conceptions, even by the language of
analogy, as to the _nature_ or _mode of existence_ or operation of that
intelligence [_i.e._, as I have stated the case, the argument can only rest
on a study of the _products_, as distinguished from the _processes_ of such
intelligence]: and still more different from any extension of our inference
from what _is_ to what _may have been_, from _present_ order to a supposed
_origination_, first adjustment, or planning of that order.

"By keeping these distinctions steadily in view, we appreciate properly
both the limits and the extent and compass of what we may appropriately
call COSMOTHEOLOGY."[19]

I have quoted these passages at length, because they convey in a more
forcible, guarded, and accurate manner than any others with which I am
acquainted, the strictly rational standing of this great subject prior to
the date at which the above-quoted passage was written. Therefore, as I
have said, if it had been my lot to have lived in the last generation, I
should certainly have rested in these "sublime conceptions" as in an
argument supreme and irrefutable. I should have felt that the progress of
physical knowledge could never exert any other influence on Theism than
that of ever tending more and more to confirm that magnificent belief, by
co