The Creator, and what we may know of the method of creation

by W. H. Dallinger

If that be so, we can make no useful inference from our finite universe. We could infer only a finite creator from a finite cosmos. To be finite is to be infinitely less than infinite; and such a being could not be the ineffable majesty of mind and might, which we apprehend, but cannot comprehend, as the Creator.

If such a limited power could be conceived, because it is finite, it of necessity began to be; and therefore its very existence was of necessity caused. We seek its cause, as we do that of all other secondary causes; until at last we reach the only position in which there is mental rest, an infinite cause of all causes, the primordial and ultimate reality of all being.

Concerning even it, the question has arisen, Must not it also have been caused? Is not this question a paradox? It is of finite being only that we can affirm the necessity for causation. What is finite begins to be; what begins to be, must have been caused to be. But if our moral and reasoning faculties bring us at last, face to face, with an inscrutable and infinite primal cause, is there a mental process exercised by us that demands that such a being must have had a cause? Experiment cannot suggest it, for this is neither finite, nor a phenomenon; and can neither be observed nor analyzed; research in it is infinitely impossible; and of experience there can be none. Science is without function in presence of a primal cause. It is powerless, by virtue of its knowledge or its methods, to affirm or to deny an infinite and eternal self-existence. And yet such is not only possible to thought, but has congruity with all the faculties of reason. The principle of causality involves merely that every finite existence must have had a cause for its being; that what is born and dies, what arises and ceases to be, what began in time and flows on in continuous mutation, had an originator. But our consciousness of causality does not and cannot include or apply to an infinite and unsearchable cause of all. We may not with our finite plummet seek to measure the depths of the Infinite, nor with our limited grasp hope to enfold the All. To say nothing of its cause, what do we know of even the universe itself? We write and talk freely of millions of miles, and in a moment reverse the process and write or speak of millionths of a grain or of an inch; we think of tens of thousandths of a second, of millions of years, and duration that is without beginning and without end. Imagination cannot picture these things, though thought can possess them. They involve the two great mysteries ever present to mind, space and time.

Space includes within itself all that can be the subject of our knowledge, yet it is not a phenomenon, not an entity, not an object of sensation. It is a pure abstraction. No space is not thinkable. By no effort of mind can we think of space as non-existent at any period in infinite duration. So far as we can see, without objects with their dimensional relations, space could not be a concept. The contents of space, out of which the mind abstracts space, are the source from whence our concept, space, emerges. An infinite void is mentally nothing; an intellect like man’s, that had never realized extension in the dimensions of material bodies, could not present it in thought, any more than it can conceive correctly the qualities of a fourth dimension.

In like manner time is not a thing, an entity, to be accounted for as a creation, a thing caused; it is a consequence of existences; duration measured by sequences. If there were no succession of events, there would be no time. Space and time are mental abstractions, respectively, of the relations of dimensions and duration.

But with what mystery and majesty, with what proportions and powers, with what mass and movement is space full! and of what sequences and phenomena has time been the unconscious recorder! It is into these that the mind of man intently peers; it is across the bourneless area of uncharted space that he would carry his mental vision; it is into all the vicissitudes that have arisen, since the succession of cosmic phenomena marked off a section of duration, that the mind of man is ever struggling to thread its way; and if possible, to find the meaning and origin of it all.

That which is the most impressive outcome of all modern physical investigation, is the apparent mechanical automatism of all cosmic sequences and phenomena within our reach. As a result, the most powerful philosophies are directed to an endeavour to establish a mechanical—that is, a mindless or purposeless—origin of the universe. But granted a universe, fully understood, exhaustively known, purely mechanical in all its present activities; even this, surely, only makes more absolute the certainty that the very conditions of its present existence, involved at its beginning, a more majestic design than all the thinkers of the past had ever dreamed.

There is no alternative; either chance, or mental purpose, gave primal origin to all that is. Nothing within the reach of intellect could express the infinite improbability of the first suggestion. That one vast harmony, one perfect method, should fall out by chance, through the operation of uncounted millenniums of ages, is almost inexpressibly improbable; but that a system of harmonies, practically infinite in number and measureless in extent, should all be locked together in one vast uniting harmony, making all creation a chorus, to which all its parts from the centre to the margin contribute their flowing and concerted strains, without a discord to the unity of thought; to say that that arose by chance, sprang from fortuity, fell out by accident, is surely to trifle with the fundamental principles of our moral faculties and reasoning powers.

Hence, nothing but philosophical ruin can be the end of materialism when enunciated in its grosser form. But our age is distinguished by the existence of a brilliant philosophical materialism, which has arrested, and is swaying, the deepest thought of our age, by the opulence of its learning and resource, by the scientific accuracy and insight of its abounding and perfect illustrations, and by the subtile, but stately method and breadth of its generalizations; but beyond all, by the fact that its world-famed author, Mr. Herbert Spencer, repels, with warmth, persistence, and manifest integrity, the very suspicion of ‘materialism’!

Yet we are compelled to ask, of what value, of what real service, are all the ideal and spiritual assumptions of his splendid and fascinating philosophy? It acknowledges a something beyond the matter and the mechanism that fills the amplitudes of space; it even designates this something a ‘power,’ But that power is declared, for ever and infinitely, beyond the circumference of knowledge: it is the ‘absolute,’ the ‘unknowable;’ it can take no part, and become no agent in, no factor of, any philosophy of the origin of the universe which we construct. On the very terms of the philosophy itself, all in heaven and earth, through all the past and all the future, can be accounted for and explained without it. If the admission into its phraseology of the existence of a ‘power,’ which is a name only, be taken as sufficient reason, then this philosophy is not materialistic. But if it be remembered that this ‘power’ is absolutely without function in this philosophy of the construction of the universe,—if it be true to its formula,—and that only matter and motion are asked for, its ultimate materialism is a certainty, and, from its very subtilty, a peril.