Inanimate matter, by itself, is dependent; incapable of life, motion, or even existence. To assert the opposite is to make it a God. In its present state it has no will. Yet there is in it existence, motion, life. The smallest molecule in a ray of polarized light and the largest planet in the system exist and move as if possessed of a Will, powerful, regular, irresistible. The powers of Nature, then, that of Gravitation, Electricity, Growth, what are they but modes of God's action? If we look deep into the heart of this mystery, such must be the conclusion. Nature is moved by the first Mover; beautified by him who is the Sum of Beauty; animated by him who is of all the Creator, Defence, and Life.[1]
Such, then, is the relation of God to Matter up to this point. He is immanent therein and perpetually active. Now, to go further, if this be true, it would seem that the various objects and things in Nature were fitted to express and reveal different degrees and measures of the divine influence, so to say; that this degree of manifestation in each depends on the capacity which God has primarily bestowed upon it;[2] that the material but inorganic, the vegetable but inanimate, and the animal but irrational world, received each as high a mode of divine influence as its several nature would allow.
Then, to sum up all in brief, the Material World with its objects sublimely great, or meanly little, as we judge them; its atoms of dust, its orbs of fire; the rock that stands by the sea-shore, the water that wears it away; the worm, a birth of yesterday, which we trample underfoot; the streets of constellations that gleam perennial overhead; the aspiring palm tree, fixed to one spot, and
- ↑ Cudworth makes three hypotheses; either, 1. All things happen in nature by the fortuitous concourse of atoms, and this it is Atheism to suppose; or, 2, There is in Nature a formative faculty, “a plastic nature,” which does the work; or, 3. Each act is done immediately by God. He, it is well known, adopts the second alternative. See Chap. III. § 37. See also More's Enchiridion Metaphysicum, Antidote against Atheism, Book II.; Apol. pro Cartesio, p. 115, et seq. On the Transcendency of God, see Descartes, Princip. P. I. No. 21, et al. Leibnitz. Théod, No. 385, et al.
- ↑ I will not say there is not, in the abstract, as much of divine influence in a wheat-straw as in a world. But in reference to ourselves there appear to be various degrees of it.
Rumi by Rückert, in his Gedichte, and Tholuck, Blüthensammlung aus der morgenlandischen Mystik.
