ANIMALS NOT AUTOMATA. 411 



be to him an external creation to his vision as thoroughly material 

 as the fields, and streams, and trees, he now looks out upon ; and, if 

 from any cause it should become fixed in the mind of him that con- 

 ceived it, so that he could not change it at will, it would become to 

 him an external reality. And this sometimes happens in abnormal 

 conditions of the mind. In order to thus create what, at least to the 

 visual sense, would be an external material creation, the only addition, 

 then, which is required to the powers which we habitually exercise is 

 that of impressing our conceptions upon others. With this addition 

 we could create and give palpable existence to a universe, varying 

 more or less from that now palpable to us. And this power of im- 

 pressing our conceptions on others we are none of us wholly devoid 

 of. Sculptors, painters, architects, and more especially poets, have it 

 in marked degree. 



We, however, find no rudiment of force in these incipient creations 

 of our own, and, hence, they furnish us with no logical ground for attrib- 

 uting it to similar and more perfect creations of a Superior Intelligence. 

 That these creations of our own are mostly evanescent, and those to 

 which, with great labor, we give a persistent reality are very limited 

 and imperfect, does not disprove the position that creation is more con- 

 ceivable to us upon the ideal hypothesis than upon the material. The 

 ideal hypothesis is also commended by the consideration that man, 

 having, in a finite degree, all the other powers usually attributed to 

 the Supreme Intelligence, lacks, under the material theory, the power 

 of creating matter. Corresponding to His omnipotence, omniscience, 

 and omnipresence, man has finite power and finite knowledge, and can 

 make all the objects of his knowledge present, which is equivalent to 

 a finite presence, limited, like our other attributes, to the sphere of our 

 knowledge. This hypothesis, then, rounds out our ideas of creative 

 intelligence, relieving us of the anomaly of the creation of matter as a 

 distinct entity, for which, having in ourselves no conscious rudiment 

 of a power to accomplish, we cannot conceive the possibility. 



I may further observe that, if I am right in supposing that the 

 only difference between our own incipient creations, of a landscape for 

 instance, and the external scenery which we perceive, is that we can 

 change the former at will, while the latter is fixed, it shows how narrow 

 is the space that divides the creative powers of man from those of the 

 Supreme Intelligence, and that the difference is mainly, if not entirely, 

 in degree, and not in kind. This gives warrant to the logic, and shows 

 how short the steps by which we attribute all creations and all changes, 

 which we regard as beyond our own power and beyond that of other 

 embodied intelligences known to us, to a superior intelligence, with the 

 same powers which we possess and use to create and change, increased, 

 I will not say infinitely, but to a degree corresponding to the effects 

 which we see and ascribe to them. 



If the existence of matter be admitted, it may still be urged that, 



