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Subternatural, sub-tėr-nat′ū-ral, adj. less than, or below, the natural.

When he acts from habit, impulse, passion, and not from choice, he is simply a natural being; when he acts from choice, he is not a natural being, but either a supernatural or a subternatural being, according as he chooses good or evil.

Thus brutes, and men like brutes, who are below the moral law, are subternatural as regards that law.

What is so low down that it lies below law, as chaos before creation; or nebulous matter not yet beginning to obey the law of gravitation; or intelligences, like Mephistopheles or Satan, who have sunk so low in sin as to have lost the perception of right and wrong, is subternatural, below nature.