sake of the world,—merely that he may, as a First Cause, explain the existence of the world. The narrow rationalizing man takes objection to the original self-subsistence of the world, because he looks at it only from the subjective, practical point of view, only in its commoner aspect, only as a piece of mechanism, not in its majesty and glory, not as the Cosmos. He conceives the world as having been launched into existence by an original impetus, as, according to mathematical theory, is the case with matter once set in motion and thenceforth going on for ever: that is, he postulates a mechanical origin. A machine must have a beginning; this is involved in its very idea; for it has not the source of motion in itself.
All religious speculative cosmogony is tautology, as is apparent from this example. In cosmogony man declares or realizes the idea he has of the world; he merely repeats what he has already said in another form. Thus here; if the world is a machine, it is self-evident that it did not make itself, that on the contrary it was created, i.e., had a mechanical origin. Herein, it is true, the religious consciousness agrees with the mechanical theory, that to it also the world is a mere fabric, a product of Will. But they agree only for an instant, only in the moment of creation; that moment past, the harmony ceases. The holder of the mechanical theory needs God only as the creator of the world; once made, the world turns its back on the creator, and rejoices in its godless self-subsistence. But religion creates the world only to maintain it in the perpetual consciousness of its nothingness, its dependence on God.[1] To the mechanical theorist, the creation is the last thin thread which yet ties him to religion; the religion to which the nothingness of the world is a present truth, (for all power and activity is to it the power and activity of God,) is with him only a surviving reminiscence of youth; hence he removes the creation of the world, the act of religion, the non-existence of the world, (for in the beginning, before the creation, there was no world, only God,) into the
- ↑ “Voluntate igitur Dei immobilis manet et stat inseculum terra . . . . et voluntate Dei movetur et nutat. Non ergo fundamentis suis nixa subsistit, nec fulcris suis stabilis perseverat, sed Dominus statuit eam et firmamento voluntatis suae continet, quia in manu ejus omnes fines terrae.”—Ambrosius (Hexaemeron. 1. i. c. 61).
