With Pantheists, the term God signifies the aggregate of Nature,--but Nature as _a being, intelligent and conscious_.

It is my inability to subscribe to either of these views which constitutes me an Atheist.

I cannot rank myself with the Theists, because I can conceive of nothing beyond Nature, distinct from it, and above it....

The Theist, therefore, I leave; but while I go with the Pantheist so far as to accept the fact of Nature in the plenitude of its diverse, illimitable, and transcendent manifestations, I cannot go further and predicate with the Pantheist _the unity of its intelligence and consciousness_!"[275] He holds, therefore, that self-existence is an attribute of Nature, that this attribute is so majestic that it may be fairly held to include _all others_, and that, while intelligence and consciousness exist, he cannot affirm their _unity_ in Nature, or regard "Nature as a being, intelligent and conscious." Whence it follows that he can give no other account of the living, intelligent, active, and responsible beings which inhabit the world, than that they came into existence, he knows not how, and that they have the ultimate ground of their existence in a necessary, underived, and eternal being, which is neither intelligent nor self-conscious! 3.

Secularism seeks to invalidate the proof from _marks of design_ in Nature by attempting to show, either that it is _merely analogical_, and can, therefore, afford no certainty, or that, if it were certain, it could prove nothing, because, by an extension of the same principle, it must prove too much.
Such is the pith and substance of Mr.Holyoake's argument in his singular pamphlet entitled, "Paley refuted in his own Words." He first of all endeavors to invalidate the proof from design by assuming that it is a mere argument from _analogy_, and that at the best analogy can afford no ground of _certainty_, although it may possibly suggest a _probable conjecture_: "It may be said that _analogy_ fails to find out God, and this must be admitted, it being no more than was to be expected.