There are, we presume, very few Hamiltonians who are prepared to indorse this bold statement of their master. Mansel, the editor and annotator of his "Lectures," has very distinctly and emphatically expressed his dissent. "Whether it be true or not that we can not conceive the quantity of existence to be increased or diminished, there is at any rate no such inability as regards the quantity of matter. It may be true as a fact that no material atom has been added to the world since the Creation; but the assertion, however true, is certainly not necessary. The power which created once must be conceived as able to create again, whether that ability is actually exercised or not. The same conclusion is still more evident when we proceed from the consideration of matter to that of mind. Of matter, we maintain that the creation of new portions is perfectly conceivable—as a result, at least, if not as a process; of mind, we believe that such creation actually takes place. Every man who comes into the world comes into it as a distinct individual, having a personality and consciousness of his own, and that personality is a distinct accession to the number of persons previously existing.... Every new person that comes into the world is a new existence."[124] Hence we are not justified in asserting that all actual existences are only different modes of one identical reality. We can not merely conceive, but we know, as a primary fact of consciousness, that the sum of existence, of personal conscious being, which is the most fundamental reality, may be increased in the universe.[125]
We readily confess that the act of creation—that is, causing wholly new existence—is utterly incomprehensible to us; so are thousands of other things. I am told by the physicist that eight hundred billions of ether-impulses impinge on the retina of the eye in a second of time to produce the sensation of deep violet;[126] and I believe it, but at the same time it is to me incomprehensible. My reason affirms that the First Cause must be infinite; and I believe it, but I can not comprehend Infinity. No logician of the present day teaches that comprehensibility is a test of truth. Is our finite capacity of conceiving or of doing a standard for Omnipotence? The only question here involved is, Can Infinite Power produce that mode of being we call matter? Does such an exercise of Infinite Power involve a contradiction? I conscientiously submit this question to my own reason, and I confess I am unable to see any contradiction. To my experiential knowledge matter presents "the essential characteristics at once of a manufactured article and a subordinate agent."[127] "This," says the distinguished Prof. Maxwell, "precludes the idea of its being eternal and self-existent.... It must have been created."[128] The notion of its origination by a Power which is unconditioned and every way unlimited, satisfies my reason, and affords the best solution of the problem of its existence. That it is self-existent, independent, eternal—"a second other God"—is directly contradictory. The original, primitive fountain of existence is Mind. This must stand at the fountain-head. God is the sole and absolute Cause of all things—of time, and all temporal relations; of space, and all spatial relations; of the primordial element, and all its properties. The creative act was not conditioned by Time or Space or Matter.[129]
[CHAPTER IV.]
CREATION.—THE GENESIS OR BEGINNING.
"The laws of nature can not account for their own origin."—J. S. Mill.
Creation was the absolutely free act of God, unconditioned by any pre-existing thing. Matter with its properties and forms, its temporal, spatial, and numerical relations; Spirit with its life and feeling, its ideas and laws—these had all their origin in the creative Word of God. Whatever is, and is not God, is the creature of God. This is the Biblical conception of Creation.
Origination and formation are so immediately and inseparably united in the Biblical notion of Creation that the revelation of the one is the revelation of the other, and we can not deny the former without logically involving ourselves in the denial of the latter. He who gave to matter its forms must have given it its essential properties, upon which many of its forms depend; and He who gave to matter its essential properties must have given it origination, for how can we conceive of substance devoid of all attributes? Whether, therefore, the account in Genesis "be found to have in view, mainly or solely, a universal or a partial creation; whether the principium there mentioned be the particular beginning of the special work there described, or the principium principiorum,—the beginning of all beginnings—the Bible is in either case a protest against the dogma of the eternity of the world, or of the eternity of matter."[130]