It is generally admitted that the world has had a beginning; is it reason or the absence of reason that we should expect to find at the origin of the world? Does it proceed so regularly in obedience to laws? Sages have said, “Laws govern matter, forces, movements, all things that are, but might not have been, just as the world is or exists, but might not have been.”
Since Darwin wrote, much discussion has taken place with regard to the origin of species, no one has thought of asking whether the Greek philosophers had anything to say on the subject. If, for instance, it had been discovered that the law of certain sidereal phenomena compelled a circular or elliptical movement, or any other geometrical form, then this law, in itself, would be a geometrical idea; that could exist, although the phenomenon in which it was realised, might disappear with the world itself.
According to Kepler, geometry has given forms for all creation, and Kepler has also said that God governs all things in conformity with Himself; in that case geometry would be anterior to the world and co-eternal with God, and if these geometrical forms which are perfect have been thought out by a perfect intelligence, is it not the same with all the component parts of the vegetable and animal kingdoms? Would a horse, or whatever the ancestor of a horse may be, have been produced spontaneously by nature? Must there not have been a type of some kind, which was realised in all horses, multiplying and varying for every new species? And in the same manner also for all trees and plants. The first types of these things existed before man, that other part of nature, and before all that man calls the good, the beautiful. Were not all these things thought and willed by a mind capable of thinking and willing?
Thus Plato reasons.
It is received in theology as in philosophy that all things have their ideal in God; matter itself has its conception and raison d’être in God; St Thomas Aquinas was able to say with no trace of pantheism, “God is eminently all things.”
Episodial
Two English travellers, Gatchet and Hall, finding themselves once amongst the Klamaths, a tribe of Red Indians, asked them concerning their beliefs; these Indians worshipped a supreme being who made the world with its plants, animals and men, whom they called “The most Ancient,” “The Ancient One on high.” The travellers then asked how He had created the world, whether by means of tools or instruments; they replied, “By thinking and willing.” This wonderful answer contains the germ of the thought which, on Greek soil, became the Logos, the act of thinking and speaking, the unique act which in the Creator means willing and producing. This answer is an echo, and by no means a feeble one, of the celebrated saying: “God is the Living One who is, in whom is the Idea of Good” (Timaeus). Plato affirms that the world and all that it contains has been made in the eternal pattern of the Idea of Good, and this Idea of Good is not separable from the Creator.
Again perfect unanimity, extending this time to the Red Indians.
It might be thought that an electric current ran round the world; certain psychical phenomena cannot otherwise be explained.