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Updated: May 6, 2025
But, on closer inspection, we find that the God of whom he speaks is not the Creator and Governor of the world, not a living, personal Being, distinct from Nature and superior to it, not the Holy One and the Just, possessing infinite moral perfections, and exercising a supreme dominion over His works; but, simply, absolute Being, the necessary self-existent Substance, whose known "Attributes" are extension and thought, and whose affections, or "Modes," comprehend all the varieties of finite existence; in short, it is Nature that is God, for every possible existence may be included under the twofold expression of Natura naturans and Natura naturata.
Harmony, that is law, alone is power. Discord is weakness. God alone is perfect, living, self-existent law. I will try, in a few words, to give the ground on which I find it possible to accept these miracles. I cannot lay it down as for any other man. I do not wonder at most of those to whom the miracles are a stumbling-block.
A study of ancient Egyptian religious texts will convince the reader that the Egyptians believed in One God, who was self-existent, immortal, invisible, eternal, omniscient, almighty, and inscrutable; the maker of the heavens, earth, and underworld; the creator of the sky and the sea, men and women, animals and birds, fish and creeping things, trees and plants, and the incorporeal beings who were the messengers that fulfilled his wish and word.
How, if at last, all compelled us to assume that God, in spite of that original incapacity of man, chose rather to give him moral laws, and forgive him all transgressions in consideration of His Son, i. e., in consideration of the self-existent total of all His own perfections, compared with which, and in which, all imperfections of the individual disappear, than not to give him those laws, and then to exclude him from all moral blessedness, which cannot be conceived of without moral laws.
He next states his first principle, which is the denial of creation: "Nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus unquam," and asks, What then is the original substance out of which existing things have arisen? The answer is, "Atoms and the Void, and beside them nothing else:" these two principles are solid, self-existent, indestructible, and invisible.
Men when pressed by sore calamity ought not to rebel against him, but rather reverence him completely, as the self-existent. Nor ought they to adore more gods than one.
As, originally, the self-existent being, unbounded, all-knowing, might take up, so to speak, if He willed, these eternal affirmative excellences of wisdom, power, and goodness; and as these, to every rational apprehension, are highly worthy of his choice, whereas their derivative and inferior corruptions would have been most derogatory to any reasonable estimate of His character; how much more likely was it that He should prefer the higher rather than the lower, should take the affirmative before the negative, should "choose the good, and refuse the evil," than endure to be endowed with such garbled, demoralizing, finite attributes as those wherewith the heathen painted the Pantheon.
He begins with the idea of self-existent Being, without which, as he imagines, nothing else can be conceived; and then, following the line of a descending series, he attempts to deduce from it the philosophy of the whole system of the universe! His Metaphysics must borrow nothing from experience; his very Psychology must be purely deductive.
And the learned Sukra becoming a planet and engaged according to the command of the Self-existent in pouring and withholding rain, and in dispensing and remitting calamities, traverses, for sustaining the lives of all the creatures in the three worlds, through the skies.
A substance, on the contrary, is self-existent; in speaking about it, we need not put of after its name. A stone is not the stone of any thing; the moon is not the moon of any thing, but simply the moon.
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