ning, and
set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther
assistance was given, and everything went on of itself. This theory is
incredibly profane, and strikes God out of the world, and nature, and
history at a single stroke, substituting for Him the course of a
well-arranged system of clockwork. But the former theory is a very
unsatisfactory and doubtful makeshift as compared with that of deism, for
it is impossible to see why, if God arranged these _causae secundariae_, He
should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these
ingenious _concursus_, _influxus_, _determinationes_, _gubernationes_, and
the like. Both theories are crude fabrications of the dogmatists, and they
have nothing left in them of the piety they were intended to protect, nor
do they become any better in this respect, however many attempts are made
to define them. Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and
artificial theories, all the things we have named above, and especially
and most directly the last of them, namely, the experience of the
revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and
movements of spiritual and religious history. And it finds its
corroboration and justification and freedom not by way of dogmatics but of
criticism. It is impossible to distinguish artificially two sets of
causes, and to give to the world what is alleged to be of the world, and
to God what is alleged to be of God. But it is permissible to point to the
insufficiency of our causal study in general, and to the limits of our
knowledge. Even when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena
are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having
discovered how things actually come to pass. Every qualitative effect and
change is entirely hidden from us as far as the cause of its coming about
and its real and inner nature are concerned. Every effect which in kind or
quantity goes beyond its cause (and we cannot make anything of the domain
of living forms, of the psychical and of history without these), shows us
that we are still only at the surface. Indeed, even mechanical action,
often alleged to be entirely intelligible, such as the transference or
transformation of energy, is, as we have seen, a complete riddle. In
addition, all causality runs its course in time, and therefore partakes of
all the defects and limitations of our views of time. And finally we are
guided by