English
But in that of creation, the action producing and the action resisted, or tbe positive and negative wills, proceed from the same being, and in tbe same act And yet this relation of the double will is not quite inconceivable ; at least we find an extremely analogous relation between the first and second wills in the so-called creations of the imagination. If, £>r instance, I represent to myself a mountain of gold, I am aivare that the image, when considered positively, is a product of which my will is a principal &ctor ; but by conceiving it at all, I give it ideally an independent existence, such an existence, in short, as resists that imaginary will, by their relation to which the second subjective and objective are distinguished from each other. It appears therefore that the products of the imagination are termed its creations with peculiar propriety. But although they r^ quire both first and second wills in their conception, and may thus afford some insight into the nature of a Divine act of creation as £tf as the mere form is concerned, yet is there one difficulty referring to the matter of the conception in which the analogy does not hokL For the creations of the imagination are merely ideal, that is to saj, their power of resistance is limited to the second will of that being exclusively whose first will produced them; and the second will, upon their resistance to which their imaginary objectivity depend APPENDIX. 563 is ideal also. Whereas the creations of the Divine imagination, whether they be worlds or human wills, are real existences, with a power of resistance to all wills in genera], and require that the second or limited will should be no less actual than they. While therefore the operations of our own minds may shew us the direction in which we have to look for the conception of creation, they cannot give us the conception itself. Now our conception of God can never go beyond what may perhaps be aptly called a spiritual anthropomorphism, or in other words, we can never introduce into our conception of Gk)d and His operations, any elements which we have not found, in kind at least, in our own minds. To attempt therefore any further anal3rsis of the relations of Creator and created than that with which the operations of our own imaginations present us, is simply a loss of time, as it is an attempt to go beyond the province of our Acuities. Creation must accordingly be assumed as a fact. But the hypothesis of the human will being a free centre of action in spite of its original dependence on the Divine will for its very existence, only involves the same difficulties as any other act of creation. For whether the created object be on the one hand subject to a rigid law of necessity, or on the other be absolutely free, its resistance to this second will in the Creator is still the indispensable condition to its being anything at all in itself, in short, to its being a creation and not a mere emanation. Hence it follows, that if the possibility of creation be once admitted, the objection to the second hypothesis vanishes, on the ground that the impossibility of our forming an adequate conception of it, arises frt>m the inadequacy of human faculties to conceive an act of creation in general, in the full sense at least in which this expression is employed of the works of the Almighty. Taking however the analogy offered by human creations as the only guide we possess for our conception of the Divine, I would re- present the relation of the human to the Divine will as that of the poem to the poet Human wills are the thoughts of the Divine Imagination. But whereas the thought of a man is a dead thing for another, until he has made it his own, these thoughts of God are in themselves centres of life and power, with a might of resistance establishing their independent individualit]^, and a fr'eedom making them like the Image of their Father, and capable, in some sort at least, of fresh creation. 564 APPENDIX. Whether the same can be said of all that proceeds from the Diyine energy, whether in short the external world is a selfsubsistent living power, or a mere emanation, is a deep question, — one that man will never answer. For my own part I am inclined to believe that the higher form of procession from God, (that of creation as opposed to emanation,) is restricted to tlie free alone, — that living wills are the only new centres of power, — and that in the glory and beauty of the material world, we gaze, though through a veil, upon the Majesty of the Eternal Not that the granite of the mountains and the verdure of the fields beneath our feet, or the blue depths and bright orbs of heaven above oiu: heads, are the living God, but that they are the maintained manifestations of His energy, operating on the souls of all living beings. The free can surely feel subdued into reverence and awe in the presence of the free alone. Cut off the outward world, bound hand and foot as it lies before us in its causal fetters, from that first source of its existence, the free and uncondi- tioned Cause, and what is there lefl in the dead machine that the spirit of a man with infinite aspirations and an eternity for their accomplishment, should feel abashed before it f In Schelling^s Essay on Human Liberty, already quoted, there is the following poetical passage. As the reader will readUy perceive, it contains single sentences with which I entirely agree, but this is not the case with its general purport. " A much higher point of view i* yielded by the contemplation of the Divine Essence itself, the idea of which is utterly contradictory to a succession which is not a genera- tion, 1. e. a putting of a self-subsistent. God is not a God of the dead, but of the living. It is inconceivable that the most perfect Being should take any pleasure in the most perfect machine. Whatever may be the manner of the succession of beings from God, which we imagine to ourselves, it can never be a mechanical one, a mere effect- ing or putting, in whicli that which is effected is nothing in itself Just as little can it be emanation, in which that which emanate^ remains tlio same with that from which it has emanated, and which therefoi-e is nothing of its own and self-subsistent The succession of things jfrom God is a self-revelation of Grod. But Grod can only reveal himself in that which is like Him, in free beings acting from thn- selves, for the exiBtonce of which there is no ground but God, but which are, as God is. He speaks, and they are there. If all world- beings were only thoughts of the Divine mind, they must even on that account l)o living. In tluj same manner indeed thoughts k APPENDIX. 565 begotten by the Boul ; but the begotten thought is an independent power, continuing to work for itself, aye, growing in the human soul to such a magnitude, that it vanquishes and subjugates its own mother. But the Divine imagination which is the cause of the specification of world-beings is not like the human, that it gives its creations merely ideal reality. The representations of the Grodhead can be only self-subsistent beings. For what else is the limiting in our representations than that we see that which is not self-^ubsistent? God sees the things in themselves. Only the Eternal, that which rests on itself Will, Freedom, is thing in itsel£ The conception of a derived Absoluteness or Divinity is so far from containing a con- tradiction, that it is rather the central conception of the whole of philosophy. Such a divinity belongs to nature. Immanence in Crod and fireedom are so little contradictory, that it is precisely the free alone and in so far as it is fr^e, that is in God, and the not free, and so far as it is not free, that is necessarily out of God.'* It is impossible to deny the eloquence of this passage in the ori- ginal, harsh as it must appear in a literal translation. With parts of it I agree entirely, but not with the general conclusion, which stated shortly seems to be, that the whole creation has a free and self- subsistent existence. This is based upon two positions, namely, that the succession of things out of God is a self-revelation of God, and that God can only reveal Himself in what is like Himself, that is, in free beings acting from themselves.