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From its embracing the Universe, it is plainly the Genesis of Moses!" It will be observed that this strange speculation goes far beyond the comparatively modest conjecture of La Place. It postulates nothing, and undertakes to account for everything. In flagrant opposition to the old atheistic maxim, "Ex nihilo, nihil," it boldly affirms, "Ex nihilo, omnia."
For Aristotle there is no creator, and his proof is adequate. But for Ibn Daud it is decidedly inadequate. We are so far minus a proof that God is a creator ex nihilo. Ibn Daud simply asserts that God created matter, but this argument does not prove it. As to the incorporeality of God Aristotle can prove it adequately from the eternity of motion.
And this is the question: Since national credit depends on national good faith, and surplus income, how can a country pay interest on debts, whose revenues have long been, and now are, miserably insufficient for the ordinary expenses of government? You cannot get blood from a stone; ex nihilo nihil fit."
Parnell puts aside the tyrannous part of the business, and cleverly throws the whole weight of his argument at Nottingham into the passionless economic scales. Yet Mr. Parnell in another breath describes Ireland as "a Lazarus by the wayside" a country "where unfortunately there is no manufacturing industry." "Ex nihilo nihil fit," was a lesson we all learned in our school days. Mr.
When I see people copying works which, as Horace has represented them, are singular in their kind, and inimitable; when I see men following irregularities by rule, and by the little tricks of art straining after the most unbounded flights of nature, I cannot but apply to them that passage in Terence: Incerta haec si tu postules Ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas Quam si des operam, ut cum ratione insanias.
1. [Greek: a]. Things which we cannot help thinking of together must coexist; thus Descartes held that, because existence is involved (though really only by the thinker himself) in the idea of a geometrical figure, a thing like the idea must exist. [Greek: b]. Whatever is inconceivable is false. The latter proposition has been defended by drawing a distinction between the principle, and its possibly wrong application to facts, e.g. to Antipodes; but how can we ever know that it has been rightly applied? Coleridge, again, has distinguished between the unimaginable, which he thinks may possibly be true, and the inconceivable, which he thinks cannot be; but Antipodes were imaginable at the same period when they were inconceivable. In fact, as even to Newton it seemed inconceivable, that a thing should act where it is not (e.g. that the sun should act upon the earth without the medium of an ether), simply because his mind was not familiar with the idea, so it may be with our incapability (if not, indeed, resulting merely from our limited faculties) of conceiving, e.g. that matter cannot think; that space is infinite; that ex nihilo nihil fit. Leibnitz's tenet that all natural phenomena must be explicable
But where would it be if we HAD free-will? rejoin the determinists. If a 'free' act be a sheer novelty, that comes not FROM me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible? How can I have any permanent CHARACTER that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded?
Nevertheless, a very pretty piece of speculative philosophy no such thing as matter impossible that there should be ex nihilo what is the Greek? I have forgot very pretty indeed; very original." "I am afraid, sir, it was very wrong to write such trash, and yet more to allow it to be published."
The old maxim "nihil ex nihilo fit" is as true in commerce as in chemistry. In a competitive society a man can get nothing for nothing. If the middleman is a capitalist he may get something for use of his capital; but that too implies that his capital is put to some useful work. Work and Pay of the Middleman.
Accordingly he finds support for his doctrine that the world was not created ex nihilo, in the fact that there is not one miracle in the Bible in which anything comes out of nothing. They are all instances of something out of a pre-existent something. The miracle of the oil in the case of Elisha is no exception. The air changed into oil as it entered the partly depleted vessel.
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