Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/427

Rh be to him an external creation—to his vision as thoroughly material as the fields, and streams, and trees, he now looks out upon; and, if from any cause it should become fixed in the mind of him that conceived it, so that he could not change it at will, it would become to him an external reality. And this sometimes happens in abnormal conditions of the mind. In order to thus create what, at least to the visual sense, would be an external material creation, the only addition, then, which is required to the powers which we habitually exercise is that of impressing our conceptions upon others. With this addition we could create and give palpable existence to a universe, varying more or less from that now palpable to us. And this power of impressing our conceptions on others we are none of us wholly devoid of. Sculptors, painters, architects, and more especially poets, have it in marked degree.

We, however, find no rudiment of force in these incipient creations of our own, and, hence, they furnish us with no logical ground for attributing it to similar and more perfect creations of a Superior Intelligence. That these creations of our own are mostly evanescent, and those to which, with great labor, we give a persistent reality are very limited and imperfect, does not disprove the position that creation is more conceivable to us upon the ideal hypothesis than upon the material. The ideal hypothesis is also commended by the consideration that man, having, in a finite degree, all the other powers usually attributed to the Supreme Intelligence, lacks, under the material theory, the power of creating matter. Corresponding to His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence, man has finite power and finite knowledge, and can make all the objects of his knowledge present, which is equivalent to a finite presence, limited, like our other attributes, to the sphere of our knowledge. This hypothesis, then, rounds out our ideas of creative intelligence, relieving us of the anomaly of the creation of matter as a distinct entity, for which, having in ourselves no conscious rudiment of a power to accomplish, we cannot conceive the possibility.

I may further observe that, if I am right in supposing that the only difference between our own incipient creations, of a landscape for instance, and the external scenery which we perceive, is that we can change the former at will, while the latter is fixed, it shows how narrow is the space that divides the creative powers of man from those of the Supreme Intelligence, and that the difference is mainly, if not entirely, in degree, and not in kind. This gives warrant to the logic, and shows how short the steps by which we attribute all creations and all changes, which we regard as beyond our own power and beyond that of other embodied intelligences known to us, to a superior intelligence, with the same powers which we possess and use to create and change, increased, I will not say infinitely, but to a degree corresponding to the effects which we see and ascribe to them.

If the existence of matter be admitted, it may still be urged that,