on was even touched upon,
at once set to work with the insufficient conceptions of old rationalism
and supernaturalism, and thus raising objections and attempting solutions
which could satisfy nobody. Especially every inadequate idea {359} which
was put forth by the advocates of faith in miracles, was gladly accepted by
its adversaries; for thereby they were furnished with a caricature of the
idea of miracles, the tearing to pieces of which was an easy and agreeable
sport to them.

The very ideas of the _natural_ and the _supernatural_ are a category which
is to be treated with caution. When discussing the question of divine
providence, we have seen that, with every free act of the will of man
springing from an ethical motive, something supernatural invades the
natural, so that in every normal human life we always see supernatural and
natural by the side of and in one another.

The distinction between the _direct_ and the _indirect action or invasion
of God_ is also to be used with great caution and restriction. For where we
are no longer able to find secondary causes, who can assert that God no
longer uses any? Where the realm of visible causes ceases and that of the
invisible begins, who can exclude secondary causes? And on the other hand,
where God acts directly, who can deny the concurrence of his direct
presence and his direct action, or reduce the value of that which was
indirectly produced?

Moreover, the often-returning conceptions of a _breaking of the laws of
nature_, or the compromises which were made between a breaking and a
non-breaking of the laws of nature by assuming a "supernatural acceleration
of the process of nature," were still more misleading. In the whole world,
infinitely many higher and lower forces act according to laws and order. In
every process, a part of the forces which in the single case surround it,
become active, and thereby hinder {360} another part from its activity. But
the laws of this other part of forces are not thereby invalidated or
broken. When a man acts with moral freedom, from mere moral motives, the
highest of the conceivable forces over which we have control comes into
direct action upon the natural. But therewith those forces, with their
laws, which would have been active if another motive had determined him,
are not yet overcome, but only hindered from their activity in exactly the
same way as one part of forces can be active and another not, where mere
mechanical acti