Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/300

Rh tions, it must be finite. No device for minimizing the meaning of this separation of creative power and created thing will really escape the difficulty resulting. And this difficulty will appear in all cases of supposed creation. It may be summed up once more in the statement that any creative power in act, just as much needs explanation in some higher law and power as does the thing created itself, so that whatever creates a product external to itself becomes thereby as truly dependent a power as we ourselves are. Let us exemplify.

“Let there he light,” shall represent a creative act. If the light that results is simply a fact in God, then our difficulty is avoided, but the very conception of a power creating anything external to itself is abandoned. Then one becomes frankly pantheistic, and identifies all things with the creative power. But if the light is not the creative act, but separate from it, then you have an insurmountable difficulty in the conception. For the power that makes the fiat is not itself the created thing, but, as it were, this power finds the product as a result of the fiat, God saying. Fiat lux, finds that this act, this word, or whatever process it symbolizes as actually happening in the divine mind, is followed by the external appearance of something, namely, light. Now as creator of light, God is not yet conceived as the creator of those conditions under which just this fiat could be followed by just these consequences. But the external success of the fiat presupposes external conditions under which the fiat can succeed. Just as when I say, “let there be light,” and pro-