In this sense, all but atheists must admit the supernatural. If, for example, you admit the creation of the world by God, that was a supernatural [pg 045] act; that did not come from the existing laws of the world, because it created those laws. All the order and beauty of the world, its variety and harmony, its infinite adaptation of part to part, and each to all,—these existed in God's mind before they existed in nature. They were supernatural, as ideas, before they appeared in nature as facts. And if, as most geologists suppose, the crust of the earth denotes a long series of creations, successive epochs, at the close of each of which new forms of vegetable and animal life appeared, then each of these was a new creation; that is, a new supernatural act of the Almighty.

The physical world, therefore, shows a power above itself. The natural testifies to the supernatural, the all to the over-all. The existing web of laws gives evidence of mind, outside of itself, above itself, arranging and governing it.