EEEOES ARISING FEOM FALSE THEOKIES. 125 



assuming, without proof, an immediate, direct, and special 

 action of the occult power in a particular natural pheno- 

 menon, instead of first referring the effect to the immediate 

 and direct action of natural laws, which will fully account 

 for it, and then inductively tracing the origin of those laws 

 up to the Great First Cause. It is contrary to truthful 

 ideas to assume a remote cause, acting through a chain of 

 events, to be an immediate one, or to ignore real direct 

 causes when explaining a scientific phenomenon in a 

 material substance. We may justifiably assume that the 

 immediate cause of the great principles of nature is an 

 Infinite Power, but not that the remote, or even the im- 

 mediate effects of those principles are immediate and 

 direct results of Divine volition, because the latter would 

 involve an immediate creation of physical force, which 

 such phenomena have never in modern times been proved 

 to exhibit; and to charge the Divine mind implicitly with 

 the contradiction of simultaneously and in the same act 

 creating and not creating power, would be a great mistake. 

 It is worthy of notice that it is usually some phenomenon 

 which appears complex, vague, or obscure to the particular 

 person, which is referred by him to the immediate and 

 direct operation of an occult cause ; and this circum- 

 stance ought at once to suggest to our minds the 

 probability that our inability to explain it arises from 

 our ignorance. A man, also, who professes to possess an 

 occult power without giving a sufficient proof of it, imposes 

 upon the credulity of his fellow-men. 



It is a provision in nature that all essentially different 

 actions exhibit essentially different characteristics, by 

 means of which they may be distinguished; and in 

 scientific phenomena, or the actions of material substances, 

 not a single clear exception to this has been proved to 

 occur since men have been able to make trustworthy 



