28 



ON MATTER, AND 



void or waste condition into a state of order and productiveness — " the Spirit 

 of God moved upon the face of the waters." And hence, to maintain from 

 the Mosaic narration that the heaven or the earth existed in a waste and 

 amorphous mass antecedently to the first act of creation, is to derang-e the 

 series of such narration, and to put that process first which Moses has put 

 second. 



I enter not here into the correctness of the general rendering, nor into the 

 exact import of the word xi;:, " created ;" for whatever be the rendering, the 

 same consecutive order of events must be adhered to, and the same conclu- 

 sion must follow. I am perfectly ready, however, to admit that does by 

 no means at all times import an absolute creation out of nothing, but, like 

 create in our own language, that it occasionally denotes the formation of one 

 thing out of another; yet when we are told that, if Moses had really intended 

 to express an absolute creation of the earth out of nothing, he would have 

 used some other word, which should have limited us to this idea, I confidently 

 put it to any critic, what word he could have employed specially appropriated 

 to such a purpose, and limited to such a sense, at the time he wrote ] or even 

 what word, thus restrained, he could select in our own day, from any spoken 

 language throughout tlie world? Words are not invented for an exclusive 

 expression of solitary facts, but for general use. The creation of the world, or 

 of aiiy thing whatever, out of nothing, is a fact of this kind; and no language 

 ever had or ever will have a term precisely struck out for the purpose of re- 

 presenting such an idea, and exclusively appropriated to it : and assuredly 

 there could be no such word at the time Moses first spoke of the fact, and 

 communicated the doctrine; as, antecedently to this, it could not have been 

 called for. And it will not be questioned, I think, that there is more sound 

 sense and judgment in employing, as on the present occasion, a well under- 

 stood term, that comes nearest to the full extent of the idea intended to be 

 conveyed, than to invent a new word for the purpose, that nobody has ever 

 heard of, and, consequently, that nobody can comprehend the meaning of, till 

 the very term that is thus objected to, or some other word from the vulgar 

 dialect, shall be had recourse to as its interpreter. Yet although, in the Hebrevy 

 Scriptures, the word is occasionally used synonymously with our own 

 terms, " to make, produce, or cause to be," to import a formation from a sub- 

 stance already in existence, we have sufficient proof that it was also under- 

 stood of old to import emphatically, like our own word "create," an absolute 

 formation out of nothing. Maimonides expressly tells us, that it was thus un- 

 derstood in the passage before us, as well as in all others that have a reference 

 to it, by the ancient Hebrews ; while Origen affirms, that such was its import 

 among many of the Christian fathers, whatever might be the opinion of the 

 rest, and forcibly objects to the passage just quoted from the Book of Wis- 

 dom, as a book not admitted into the established canon of Scripture. 



Still, however, the doctrine of a creation of something out of nothing was 

 generally held to be a palpable absurdity ; and a variety of hypotheses were 

 invented to avoid it, of which the three following appear to have been the 

 chief; each of them, however, if I mistake not, plunging us into an absurdity 

 ten times deeper and more inextricable. The first is that of an absolute and 

 independent eternity of matter, to which I have already referred; the second, 

 that of its emanation from the essence of the Creator; the third that of 

 idealism, or the non-existence of a material world. 



1 have already remarked, that the first of these was modified under the 

 plastic hands of different philosophers of antiquity into a great variety of 

 shapes ; and hence, in some form or other, is to be traced through most of 

 the Grecian schools, whether of the Ionic or Italic sect — or, in other words, 

 whether derived from Thales or from Pythagoras. In no shape, however, is 

 it for a moment capable of standing the test of sober inquiry. We may re- 

 gard matter as essentially and eternally intelligent, or as essentially and eter- 

 nally unintelligent ; as essentially intelligent in its several parts, or as essen- 

 tially intelligent as a whole. The dilemma is equal in all these cases. Mat- 

 ter cannot be intelligent as a whole, without being intelligeut in every atom. 



