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as we allow ourselves to be carried from one to another of its 
conclusions. 
Suspending our reliance on Scriptural authority, except in so 
far as to assume the existence of God as set forth for our 
belief, let us see whether we can, as natural philosophers, 
understand how He made the material world out of nothing. 
This is the truth from which I start. 
I begin by remarking that the only nothing it is possible for 
me to conceive is empty space, which I think of as boundless 
in extent, eternal in endurance, but — with respect to entity — 
uncreated and absolutely nothing. Now, God is described as 
ever filling all space ; for which we can conceive the qualifica- 
tion to be His boundlessness and eternal existence. Whenever, 
then, we observe created things to be in space we must con- 
clude that they are, together with ourselves literally, also in 
Him ; but to receive this at the hand of reason with all the 
satisfaction which truth should confer needs some little pre- 
paration. That matter can exist in space — which we should 
be inexact in calling an immaterial thing, as it is a simple nega- 
tion of all things, whether material or immaterial — is easy to 
be understood; but to believe matter to be received into 
intellect or spirit is an incongruity so long as we look upon 
matter as we now do. We cannot imagine any mind to be 
tenanted by the actual hard solids of Newton's system. If, 
then, the creation be in God, we must prepare to believe it to be 
only a mental conception, however real and material it may 
seem to us ; and that seeming reality we must account for. 
These considerations suggest a way in which the creation of 
material things may possibly have taken place. Mind is capable 
of forming and entertaining geometrical conceptions ; and 
there is no difficulty in concluding the power of the Almighty 
to be limited only by His will. Now, men have minds, and 
each can form conceptions — it may be of small geometrical 
spheres, which it truly imagines to be within itself in space. 
Those spheres may be conceived to be either distinctly separate, 
or to so intersect one another that any number of them may 
be more or less compounded with each one. As in the case of 
our own mind at every instant to a finite extent, so the mind 
of God at the creation can be imagined to have occupied itself 
to an infinite extent with first conceiving such immaterial 
spheres, and then, with a sovereignty entirely His own, com- 
manding them never to penetrate or intersect one another , even 
in thought. That irresistible command, which no creature has 
the power to issue or to question, would to all intents and pur- 
poses convert the geometrical spheres instantaneously into the 
hard resisting matter of Newton, existing as a conception in 
