Martineau relied on intuition to claim that the phenomenal world mirrors a noumenal world (the world of things we cannot experience) in which real objects are causally related. He held that this reality is the result of God’s will. In ethics he claimed that we choose our motives first and then our actions. Intuition tells us which ones are the higher motives and that the highest one is reverence. (He meant that the desire to revere motivates our best actions.)