Mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet:
warning his reader, however, against the doctrine which such expressions as these are sometimes understood to express. “All these things he rules, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord of all.”
Clarke, the friend and disciple of Newton, is one of those who has most strenuously put forwards the opinion of which we are speaking, “All things which we commonly say are the effects of the natural powers of matter and laws of motion, are indeed (if we will speak strictly and properly,) the effects of God’s acting upon matter continually and at every moment, either immediately by himself, or mediately by some created intelligent being. Consequently there is no such thing as the course of nature, or the power of nature,” independent of the effects produced by the will of God.
Dugald Stewart has adopted and illustrated the same opinion, and quotes with admiration the well-known passage of Pope, concerning the Divine Agency, which
“Lives through all life, extends through all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent.”
Mr. Stewart, with no less reasonableness than charity, asserts the propriety of interpreting such passages according to the scope and spirit of the reasonings with which they are connected;[44] since, though by a captious reader they might be associated with erroneous views of the Deity, a more favourable construction will often see in them only the results of the necessary imperfection of our language, when we dwell upon the omnipresence and universal activity of God.
Finally, we may add that the same opinions still obtain the assent of the best philosophers and divines of our time. Sir John Herschel says, (Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, p. 37.) “We would no way be understood to deny the constant exercise of His direct power in maintaining the system of nature; or the ultimate emanation, of every energy which material agents exert, from his immediate will, acting in conformity with his own laws.” And the Bishop of London, in a note to his “Sermon on the duty of combining religious instruction with intellectual culture,” observes, “the student in natural philosophy will find rest from all those perplexities which are occasioned by the obscurity of causation, in the supposition, which although it was discredited by the patronage of Malebranche and the Cartesians, has been adopted by Clarke and Dugald Stewart, and which is by far the most simple and sublime account of the matter; that all the events, which are continually taking place in the different parts of the material universe, are the immediate effects of the divine agency.”
[CHAPTER IX.]
On the Impression produced by considering the Nature and Prospects of Science;
or, on the Impossibility of the Progress of our Knowledge ever enabling us to comprehend the Nature of the Deity.