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as we have been told a hundred times, both by Catholics and Protestants, refuted Spinoza, did his great work of refutation by confounding Spinoza's substance with the substance of ordinary thinking, proving that everything has its own substance, which in Bayle's sense was perfectly true; but the argument had nothing to do with Spinoza. So long as the problem of Being is unsolved, the problem of Pantheism too will remain unsolved. II. The question of being involves a further question-that of creation. There are three views of creation. The first is properly emanation, or the evolution of all things from the essence of God. The second is that of some of the ancient philosophers that God wrought on an eternal material, external to Himself. The third is the modern Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing. We waive altogether the question of the Mosaic creation. Geology has demonstrated that that was not a creation out of nothing; at least it was not the beginning of material or organized existence, and the best Hebrew scholars are agreed that the Hebrew word which we translate created does not necessarily mean more than formed. Our enquiry is not then concerning the Mosaic creation, but concerning the beginning of phenomenal or finite existence, and how the Infinite and the finite can exist together. We see at once that they cannot, for the Infinite can leave no room for a finite to stand over against it. We can add nothing to infinite Being. It is already all that is or can be. If a worm, or a drop of water, or a blade of grass has any real being by itself, that being is subtracted from the Infinite, and it ceases to be infinite. It matters not whether the finite existence be a universe or an atom of dust, a deity or a worm, the least of conceivable being subtracted from the Infinite deprives it of infinity. God said the Eleatics, 'is either all or nothing, for if there is a reality beyond Him, that reality is wanting to His perfection.' The finite or the Infinite must go; either there is no God or no world. The Eleatics were certain of the existence of God. They were certain that Being existed and that it was infinite. They had, therefore, but one alternative. That was to make the world merely phemena. It is confessed on all sides that this is the real question at issue. This is the argument which can not be answered. Plato felt it, and tried to solve it by means of the ideas, but he left the problem where he found it. Aristotle felt it, but notwithstanding his supposition of an eternal matter, and his evident leaning to a personal creative Deity, he fell back on abstract being, leaving the relation of God to the world undetermined, if he

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did not really identify the Divine Being with the all-life of the universe. Malebranche felt that philosophy led him inevitably to a doctrine of creation different from that of the Church, but he harmonized the two on the Cartesian principle of believing the Church's doctrine on the Church's authority; and, therefore, though a philosopher, he believed in the existence of a material world and its creation out of nothing. M. Saisset refuted Pantheism, yet at the end of the refutation he cried, 'God creates eternally.' And this is the universal utterance of reason. 'How,' Mr. Mansel asks, can the relative be conceived as coming into being? If it is a distinct reality from the absolute it must be conceived as passing from non-existence into existence. But to conceive an object as non-existent, is again a self-contradiction, for that which is conceived exists, as an object of thought, in and by that conception. We may abstain from thinking of an object at all; but, if we think of it, we can but think of it as existing. It is possible not to think of an object at all, and at another time to think of it as already in being; but to think of it in the act of becoming, in the progress from not-being into being, is to think that which in the very thought annihilates itself. Here again the Pantheistic hypothesis seems forced upon us. We can think of creation only as a change in the condition of that which already exists, and thus the creature is conceivable only as a phenomenal mode of the being of the creation. The whole of this web of 'contradictions is woven from one original warp and woof,-namely, the impossibility of conceiving the co-existence of the Infinite and the finite, and the cognate impossibility of conceiving a first commencement of phenomena, or the absolute giving birth to the relative. The law of thought appears to admit of no possible escape from the meshes in which thought is entangled, save by destroying one or other of the cords of which they are composed. Pantheism or Atheism are thus the only alternative offered to us, according as we prefer to save the Infinite by the sacrifice of the finite, or to maintain the finite by the sacrifice of the Infinite.' M. Mansel has a way of his own to escape this dilemma of which we shall have occasion to speak again. Another argument for emanation, or the impossibility of creation, is derived from the want of material external to God, on which He can work. To make something out of nothing is an act which we cannot conceive. In our idea of cause, the material or passive element is always present. To change the nothing into something is to give nonentity the qualities of reality. We

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may, indeed, suppose that God has made the first matter of the universe, and then wrought on it, externally, but this supposes two substances one of God and one of the world, which cannot co-exist as we have already seen, that of God being infinite, and the other finite. This argument virtually revolves itself into the first.

A third difficulty in supposing a creation is found in the moral nature of God. Either He creates from necessity or voluntarily. If from necessity, He must be controlled by some power beyond or outside of His own being, but this is contrary to our idea of God. He must create freely. But here we are encompassed with manifold difficulties. God's will must, like Himself, be eternal. If He has willed, He has willed eternally. The things produced must then, also, be eternal. It is impossible that His will could have been without the means of being accomplished. There is some sophistry in this argument, for God's will may have been that the universe be temporal and not eternal, There is more validity in the objection from the imperfection of the world. Why did God will what is imperfect? If the world is neither perfect, eternal, nor infinite as the advocates of creation. say, why, as Malebranche expresses it, has God taken upon Himself the base and humiliating condition of a Creator?' These are all questions we cannot solve, for the idea of creation is at war with the idea of the Infinite.

The second doctrine of creation, that of an eternal matter, is no longer tenable. The objection, from the impossibility of the co-existence of the infinite and the finite is as valid against it as against any view of creation. The third doctrine, that of creation from nothing, is the received doctrine of the Churches. Hegel, as we have seen, like an orthodox philosopher as he was, or at least meant to be, embraced this view, maintaining that the denial of this was the origin of the Pantheism of Parmenides and Spinoza. Spinoza himself thought that he escaped Pantheism, by saying that creation, though eternal in the sense of never ending duration, was not eternal in the proper, philosophical, or Alexandrian sense that eternity is distinct from all duration, and means absolute existence or the perfection of being. This is the sense in which it is generally used by the more learned of the Fathers, and which seems to be sanctioned by S. John in his Gospel. Creation out of nothing, they did not understand. It was introduced, as Hegel says, by the later Christian metaphysic.* It does not mean that nothing was the

* It is difficult to say when the doctrine of creation from nothing was first

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entity out of which God created, but that God called into existence by an act of His power, a new substance. The NeoPlatonists called this new substance the phenomenal or created as distinct from the eternal and real, and probably this was what Spinoza meant when he said there was only one substance; and the moment we begin to reason on the subject we see that there is no other conclusion consistently to be reached, but that this substance is the reality of all phenomenal and finite existence. "When we are aware," says Sir William Hamilton," of something which begins to exist, we are by the necessity of our intelligence, constrained to believe that it has a cause. But what does this expression, that it has a cause, signify? analyse our thought, we shall find that it simply means that as we cannot conceive any new existence to commence, therefore all that now is seen to arise under a new appearance, had previously an existence under a prior form. We are utterly unable to realize in thought, the possibility of the complement of existence, being either increased or diminished. We are unable on the one hand, to conceive nothing becoming something, or on the other, something becoming nothing. When God is said to create out of nothing, we construe this to thought, by supposing that He evolves existence out of Himself; we view the Creator as the cause of the universe. Ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti,' expresses in its purest form the whole intellectual phenomenon of causality." In another place, Sir William says -We are unable to construe in thought that there can be an atom absolutely added to, or an atom absolutely taken away from, existence in general. Make the experiment. Form to yourselves a notion of the universal; now, conceive that the quantity of existence, of which the universe is the sum, is either amplified or diminished? You can conceive the creation of the world as lightly as you can conceive the creation of an atom. But what is creation? It is not the springing of nothing into something. Far from it; it is conceived, and is by us conceivable, merely as the evolution of a new form of existence, by the fiat of the Deity. Let us suppose the very crisis of creation. Can we realize it to ourselves, in thought, that the moment after the universe came into manifested being, there was a larger

taught. Plato makes the world to be made from the non-existent, but this with Plato means matter. Athanasius and Arius were agreed that the body of Christ, like all other created things, was made from the non-existent, but Athanasius maintained that the Divinity of Christ was uncreated, and therefore the Son was consubstantial with the Father.

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complement of existence in the universe and its Author together, than there was the moment before, in the Deity Himself alone? This we cannot imagine. What I have now said of our conception of creation, holds true of our conception of annihilation. We can conceive no real annihilation, no absolute sinking of something into nothing. But, as creation is cogitable by us only as an exertion of divine power, so annihilation is only to be conceived by us as a withdrawal of the divine support. All that there is now actually of existence in the universe, we conceive as having virtually existed, prior to creation, in the Creator; and in imagining the universe to be annihilated by its Author, we can only imagine this as the retractation of an outward energy into power. Mr. Calderwood in a criticism of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy denounces this view of causation and creation as essentially Pantheistic. Mr. Mansel regrets that Mr. Calderwood should ever have charged this theory with Pantheism; for, if ever there was a philosopher whose writings from first to last are utterly antagonistic to every form of Pantheism, it is Sir William Hamilton. But what in all the world is Pantheism if it is not that God evolves the universe out of Himself?* Mr. Stuart Mill denies the statement that we cannot conceive a beginning or an end of physical existence. Its inconceivableness belongs only to philosophers and men of science, not to the ignorant who easily conceive that water is dried up by the sun, or that wood and coals are destroyed by the fire. But surely a metaphysician like Mr. Stuart Mill knows that the phenomenon of thought is not to be taken from what the fool thinks, but from what the philosopher thinks. The true phenomenology of mind is not that of the ignorant unthinking mind, but of the mind which thinks.

That the matter of the universe is an efflux of God' was the doctrine of Milton, and he maintains that it is the doctrine, not only of the old Fathers but of the New Testament. It is clear' he says, 'that the world was framed out of matter of some kind or other. For since action and passion are relative terms; and since, consequently, no agent can act externally unless there be some patient such as matter, it appears impossible

Mr. Mansel says that Sir William Hamilton's theory represents the Pantheistic hypothesis as the result of a mere impotence of thought. This is Sir William Hamilton's theory generally, at least as interpreted by Mr. Mansel, but in what he here says of creation he seems to imply that it is impossible for us to conceive creation except as emanation. Mr. Calderwood, in a second edition of his work, says, "It would have been gratifying had I seen sufficient grounds to warrant it, in deference to the opinions expressed, first by Professor Fraser, and then after by Dr. Mansel, to withdraw the assertion that Hamilton's

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