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“ 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.” 
There is some inaccuracy of expression here, but there seems to be no 
doubt he does not intend to speak of an actual existence, in thus alluding to 
space. When we come to the passage beyond, in which the author attempts 
(and, as I think, legitimately) to explain, or to endeavour to realize, how 
something material could come to be created out of nothing, I think we must 
not press him too hard. I quite agree with Mr. Row that in all probability 
men will never be able to understand the method in which God has created 
matter ; but still, with regard to the material things surrounding us, it is a 
legitimate exercise of man’s reason to endeavour to understand, so far as we 
can, how they came to be. Lord Bacon has told us that it is the glory of 
God to conceal a thing, but it is the glory of man to find it out ; and he 
speaks of man as being so incompetent to arrive at a thorough knowledge of the 
science of things that he considers the Deity is, as it were, almost playing with 
man as if he were a child on these subjects ; while man is continually baffled 
in his attempts to penetrate into the nature of even the very simplest things. 
When we try to discover how material things can have come into being from 
the act of an eternal, immaterial spirit, it is a difficult matter ; but perhaps 
not more difficult than to understand how we can get this solid table, for 
instance, by a pure spiritual conception, into the mind. On this point Mr. 
Row almost refuted himself ; for he admitted that his mind had nothing in 
it but impressions or ideas, and yet he had the impression of the solidity of 
the table in his mind, notwithstanding his difficulty to realize it. Berkeley 
does not deny the objective existence of things, or the existence of the 
external world, but only that they have a material substratum. He says 
their substratum is spiritual. He does not deny the existence of the table, 
or of anything else ; he merely attempts to account for the mode of their 
apparent existence. It is not a bad conception on the part of the author, 
then — it may be inadequate, but still it is ingenious — to suppose that the 
atoms of which we have heard so much from the ancient philosophers and 
from Dalton, although they are now a little at a discount in the philosophical 
world, were originally mere conceptions on the part of the Deity, as circles, 
triangles, and so on. Some of the atomic philosophers tell us that the atoms 
are round, and others that they are angular. Newton contended that all 
acids had their peculiar strong sharp flavour because they were made up of 
angular atoms which cut the tongue slightly. When Mr. Laming supposes 
that these atoms of matter are geometrical conceptions, to which the Deity 
gave a kind of existence by ordaining that they should not interpenetrate or 
intersect each other, that gives you solidity, and goes to solve the difficulty 
in understanding how anything solid which can resist any other thing may 
have proceeded from the fiat of the Eternal Spirit. But still it appears to 
me simpler and just as philosophical to suppose that all material things were 
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