508 “ Ultimate Religious Ideas." [September, 
agency is both conceivable and thinkable, and creation in 
such an exposition is accepted by many theologians and 
philosophers. 
The assumption of carpentry is somewhat beside the 
question, as also are the assumptions of theologians and 
philosophers. We have the faCts of this genesis in pheno- 
mena ; we have the thing, but we do not know the whence 
and the why of the thing. The supposition as “ a workman 
shapes a piece of furniture” is not consistent, for it is the 
assumption of an hypothesis of which there is no possibility 
of proof. In Nature we find gigantic systems of mechanics 
and a wondrous chemical apparatus all working to the same 
end, each without manipulations and by the impulsion of an 
internal potency. 
The propositions “ Self-existent,” Self-created,” and 
“ Created by an external agency,” in the sense of the text 
to me appear to be the same, the difference being in their 
statement. This, further on, Mr. Spencer appears to admit, 
but at all events to one and all is attached the mystery of 
their origination. It is so easy to propound subtleties im- 
possible of answer. Mr. Lewes has taught us the difference 
there is between imagination and conception. 
Th$ conception of a God is the gradual growth of human 
thought, whatever may have been the source of the primitive 
idea ; perhaps it might be found when the Old World men 
heard in the thunder “ the hammer clang of a God,” or in 
the gentler assumptions of the Vedic worshippers, — “ that 
in the brightness of light and the benefits showered on man 
by the vivifying effects of the sun were seen the aCts of a 
beneficent power, which man’s gratitude or superstition 
deemed to be divine.” Religious thoughts, as well as scien- 
tific thoughts, require development, and had there not been 
some innate sentiment in the mind corresponding to what is 
called religious thought, — “ the sentiment of religion,” — 
which had a development long before Anaxagoras* admitted 
the conception of a Supreme Being and more perfect as 
thought than those found in the theses of Plato. There may 
be an analogy between the process of manufacture and the 
process of a creation, but John Stuart Mill teaches there is 
a great distinction between analogy and induction. 
The general belief among men is of a self-existent cause, or 
God; but a created Universe is a different conception to the 
* Anaxagoras was the first of the Greek philosophers who propounded the 
sublime idea “ of one harmonising intelligence. The vovq, however, became 
a moral providence only in the hands of Socrates ” (Dr. Nichol). In India the 
idea long preceded that of Anaxagoras. 
