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Updated: May 21, 2025
The notion of necessarily existing matter seems to the Author of this Apology fatal to belief in God; that is, if by the word God be understood something not matter, for 'tis precisely because priests were unable to reconcile such belief with the idea of matter's self-existence or eternity, that they took to imagining a 'First Cause. In the 'forlorn hope' of clearing the difficulty of necessarily existing matter, they assent to a necessarily existing spirit; and when the nature of spirit is demanded from these assertors of its existence they are constrained to avow that it is material or nothing.
Fiske, by predicating Divinity of the Primal Something, implicitly attributes to it the quality of an eternal self-existence, I infer that Cosmic Theism may be concluded at this point to part company with Pantheism. There remain, then, Theism and Atheism. Now undoubtedly, at first sight, Cosmic Theism appears to differ from Atheism in one all-important particular.
But I am forestalling. The question now is: What was that life, the thing made in the Son made by him inside himself, not outside him made not through but in him the life that was his own, as God's is his own? It was, I answer, that act in him that corresponded in him, as the son, to the self-existence of his father. Now what is the deepest in God? His power?
And as for the self-existence of substances, it is very true that a substance may be conceived to exist without any other substance, but so also may an attribute without any other attribute: and we can no more imagine a substance without attributes than we can imagine attributes without a substance.
The mystery which they recognize in this great fact surrounding them on every side, they transfer to an alleged source of this great fact, and then suppose that they have solved the mystery. But they delude themselves. Self-existence is inconceivable; and this holds true whatever be the nature of the object of which it is predicated.
The miraculous birth of Bata in his third transformation is, as we have noticed, closely paralleled by the birth of Atys from the almond. The idea at the root of this is that of self-creation or self-existence, as in the usual Egyptian phrase, "bull of his mother."
In the tenth century we find what at first seems to be a growth out of Polytheism into Monotheism, for a new Being, to whom the attributes of infinity, self-existence and omniscience are ascribed, is invented and named Adi-Buddha, or the primordial Buddha.
And even if we had been pointed to this passage containing the revelation of God at the bush, we should probably only have seen in it another of the magnificent affirmations of the Divine self-existence, another of the grand "I Am's" which sound forth at times from the mount of cloud and vision.
But the Lord must for ever remain apart from our weak natures, as far as the sun is above the earth. He lives, in His incomprehensible self-existence, at an immeasurable distance from us. This the Divine Man sees, and in His tender compassion and loving mercy for every human soul He creates, a twin-soul is made, that the finite may find the fullness of delight in another finite existence.
One thing, however, it is impossible for me to bring into question, namely, that I myself, who exercise this doubting function, exist. There is one single point at which doubt is forced to halt at the doubter, at the self-existence of the thinker. I can doubt everything except that I doubt, and that, in doubting, I am.
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