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Updated: May 29, 2025
It is only in the last three or four thousand years, and through weak and tentative methods of expression, through clumsy cosmogonies and theologies, and with incalculable confusion and discoloration, that the human mind has felt its way towards its undying being in the race.
+679+. The great civilized nations, with their well-formed anthropomorphic deities, have constructed elaborate cosmogonies, which commonly begin with the conception of an unshaped mass of material out of which the gods arise and create the world.
The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may, indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.
Instinctively, when he talked to the boy, he adapted himself to his mode of thought; ancient legends, the material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind: half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows, like a spring passing from pool to pool.
But so far I have not taken up the collateral aspect of the synthesis of human consciousness, the development of collective feeling and willing and expression in the form, among others, of religious institutions. Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated.
Among the Hindoos the same myth takes the form of an alluring epic the dragon watching over the celestial waters, of which he has taken possession, is wounded by Indra after a heroic battle, and restores them to the earth. Cosmogonies, Lang remarks, furnish a good example of the development of myths; it is possible to mark out stages and rounds according to the degree of culture and intelligence.
It comes among those tracts on Natural Science in which the poet and philosopher turned his restless mind to problems of light and colour, of leaf and flower, of bony skull and kindred vertebra; and it sounds like a prose-poem, a noble paean, eulogizing the love and glorifying the study of Nature. It was a variant of the old traditional cosmogonies.
Meantime, certain love-affairs, that came to nothing, as people say, have the strangest importance: he crowds us with detail: certain whimsical opinions, cosmogonies, and religions of his own invention, and, especially his relations to remarkable minds, and to critical epochs of thought: these he magnifies.
A person who gathered his ideas of William Law from Wesley's critique would probably turn with impatience, and something like aversion, from one who could use upon the gravest subjects what might seem a strange jargon compounded out of Gnostic cosmogonies and alchemistic fancies.
This whole view, like all world-theories and cosmogonies of pantheism, naturalism, or atheism, and even like the latest of Eduard von Hartmann, is to us but a proof that the rejection of the reality of a living Creator and Lord of the world requires of its advocates mysteries and mysticisms of atheism compared to which the greatest difficulties of the Christian view of the world are but the merest trifles.
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