d on a confusion of efficient causes
with ideal results. But the same is true of many a renowned philosophy.
To appeal to what we call the supernatural is really to rest in the
imaginatively obvious, in what we ought to call the natural, if natural
meant easy to conceive and originally plausible. Moral and individual
forces are more easily intelligible than mechanical universal laws. The
former domesticate events in the mind more readily and more completely
than the latter. A miracle is so far from being a contradiction to the
causal principle which the mind actually applies in its spontaneous
observations that it is primarily a better illustration of that
principle than an event happening in the ordinary course of nature. For
the ground of the miracle is immediately intelligible; we see the mercy
or the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some other
sort that inspired it. A mechanical law, on the contrary, is only a
record of the customary but reasonless order of things. A merely
inexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be no
miracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that, contrary to what is
usually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if the
water of Lourdes, bottled and sold by chemists, cured all diseases,
there would be no miracle, but only a new scientific discovery. In such
a case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why we
were created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effect
morally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it be
favourable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomes
miraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedience
of nature to the exigencies of spirit. Were there no known ground for
such a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events,
we should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have no
relation to religion.

[Sidenote: Superstitions come of haste to understand.]

What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence
in the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as we
have laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous and
cannot fulfil its function until it applies mechanical categories to
existence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moral
intelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmony
in the world. For moral significance