1. We cannot deny that the will of man is a real cause, producing continual changes in the world about us. More than this, if there are not also second causes outside of the will of free intelligent personalities, the whole universe must be a gigantic deception; for it seems to be full of second causes. Long chains of what seem like second causes exist, made up of infinite numbers of links, as when the sun carries an amount of water up into the air, the latter dropping the water upon a mountain in the form of rain, gravity rolling it down the slope in vast force, sweeping away villages and towns, changing the fates of individuals and of nations. To quote two familiar examples from Stewart and Tait: "In a steam engine the amount of work produced depends upon the amount of heat carried from the boiler into the condenser; and this amount depends in its turn upon the amount of coal which is burned in the furnace of the engine. In like manner the velocity of the bullet which issues from the rifle depends upon the transformation of the energy of the powder; this in turn depends upon the explosion of the percussion cap; this again upon the fall of the trigger; and lastly this upon the finger of the man who fires the rifle."
Thus even the very strongest opponents of the idea of second causes never deny that the latter seem to surround us on every side, and that it would be possible to trace a continuous line of apparent effects and causes back to the very beginning.
This view of the matter, it is evident, readily leads to a deistic view of the universe,--or to that burlesque of the Christian view spoken of as the doctrine of an "absentee God," watching His universe run from the outside, slightly concerned with what it does.
2. On the other hand, a careful study of the correlation of forces shows us that the great First Cause is still very closely related to the operation of His universe. We may start, for instance, with the old argument from the evidences of
design
in nature, which, though often sneered at of late, cannot be cavalierly dismissed in this way; for, as Dugald Stewart has well said, "every combination of means to an end implies intelligence." But the direct or immediate action of the great Intelligence behind nature is manifest in the marvellous behavior of the cells; which, instead of behaving in a way to indicate that their life processes are due to properties inherent in the atoms and molecules composing them, show every appearance of being
mere automata
under the direct control of an intelligent, purpose-filled Mind,--a Mind external to themselves, it is true, and gloriously transcending them, but constantly, ceaselessly exercised by an immediate action which we may well call "immanent," in the original and proper sense of this term. Yet vital action is capable of exact correlation with the other forces of nature; and thus the modern law of the correlation of forces teaches us that the energy behind life must be the same as the energy pervading all nature, the various manifestations of which we know as light, heat, gravity, electricity, etc. Thus while the study of the behavior of life or the doctrine of "vitalism" might encourage us to think that in the cells and in the behavior of protoplasm we are witnessing the direct action of an intelligent Creator; yet we find that by the correlation of forces we must
say the same about all the physical and chemical phenomena of nature