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plan, and purpose as disclosed in a scientific history and true knowledge of the universe so far; for all this must depend upon his free will, which must remain forever free. Absolute foreknowledge in this would reduce God and his universe to mere necessity, fixed fate, and foreordination absolute, and the order of his providence to a blind, immovable, inevitable fatality, and world-machine. There is no conceivable possibility of such foreknowledge, and any attempt to conceive it, or state it, must always end in contradiction and absurdity: therefore no revelation out of any such foreknowledge can possibly be made to man in any way, and none such ever was made.

We should not attempt to conceive of God as a being outside the universe itself, and simply operating upon a self-subsistent dead matter as a something coeternal with him and distinct from his own thinking essence, substance, or power, but rather as the Master Architect, who works with his own materials, indeed, in the structure-building process of construction of a universe, but who is, at the same time, that absolute and sovereign architect, who first forms his own materials in whatever infinitesimal atoms, or thinnest imponderable ethers, and, as it were, Arachnelike, spins his material out of the one substance of all substances, himself, and builds ether upon ether, atom upon atom, crystal upon crystal, cell upon cell, and structure upon .structure, throughout the fabric of nature, beginning the work at the point of beginning of all creation, where infinite passes into finite, and is bounded out of all the possibilities of a thinking power; as when the sixty-two simple substances (more or less) were created; or as when this evolving and constructing power, starting at the germinal dot, or innermost centre of the innermost vesicle of the seed, or the egg, spins the thread and weaves the tissue out of existing materials, and builds up a shoot, or an embryo, breathing into it, or exhibiting within it, at the same time, as much life, or as much soul, as it needs, or can have.

And it is precisely at such point, always, that a mathemati cal science of force, motion, revolution, number, magnitude quantity, proportion, and instrumentation, begins to be possible; for mathematics is the science of the laws of thought, creative or destructive, under which the actual given creation comes forth into existence, and alone can come of which science of laws, again, knowledge is foreknowledge always, just so far. But for the rest, it must be left to the fabled three, Clotho, the spinner, Nemesis, the fate which is judicial providence, and Atropos, whose tearless shears are necessity and death.

What is given in the origin of the finite soul, is the special thinking power. That power is simply a specialization of the total divine power of thought; and it is of the very essence and nature of that power to be self-acting and self-directing cause, and self-moving soul; or nearly what Bacon calls "the highest generality of motion or summary law of nature," which God would "still reserve within his own curtain." 1 There is a difference between power and will, and between will and free-will. Will is that which measures the given amount of power, and the totality of all power; and it is not free. It is a necessary fact: it merely expresses the fact of the existence of the power in its actual totality. The power as such totality is by its own nature necessarily in activity as self-acting and self-directing cause this is a part of the fundamental fact of its. existence. Free-will, again, is not the active, choosing, and directing cause, or power itself, but only the freedom of the power as choosing cause, and that which admits of difference of direction of the power which exists already as self-acting and self-directing cause. Free-will expresses only that necessary law and condition of all thinking, wherein is the possibility of duality, plurality, difference, variety, coördination, opposition, and involution of particulars, in the creation of conceptions: it is merely freedom as one of the possibilities of a thinking existence.

1 Valerius Terminus.

But besides the freedom which exists under this inner law of thought, there is another kind of freedom for a finite soul; and that is freedom of practical action and effect, or operation, upon the body and the rest of the external world; for which the limitations are the order of divine providence in the rest of the universe external to the soul, and which, beyond the extent to which it may be modified or changed, by the action of the soul upon it as causative power, must exist as absolute fate for the soul. In that change, there is necessarily a certain concurrence in the mind of the Creator, ending in an equilibrium of stationary balance, depending on the necessary general stability of the whole and the essential natures of particular things, the providential plan in the distribution of particulars in the universal variety, the amount of power given and exerted in the twofold direction, and the extent and scope of liberty allowed to the finite soul as a practical free agent.

The direction cannot precede the power. Some direction must follow, of necessity, the activity of the power. A point cannot move without creating a line, straight, or curved, nor create a line without moving; nor move without causative power. Movement, that is, creation, begins at a mathematical point; and on this fundamental truth Newton based the Calculus.” 1 The direction must begin at exactly the same point in time and space as the activity of the power. Free-will is that freedom or liberty on all sides, in which is determined the direction of the power in action as self-directing cause, within the given range of liberty, one way rather than another, giving the straight line, or the curve, and what line, and what curve. Will is that which necessitates some direction, and some line, or some curve, the power being in activity as an ultimate fact. The range of free-will for the finite soul is circumscribed by the limitations of its own specially constituted sphere of activity, consisting of the given limited amount of power

1 Principia, Bk. I., § 1, Lemma II.

and the inner laws of power as thought, on the one side, and of the outer world, the external order of providence. or fate, on the other side; within which arise and exist all the external and foreign limiting determinators of the selfdirecting power, the inner metaphysical and necessary, the external physical, whether fixed, or variable, the judicial, the moral, the æsthetical, and the religious; and the range of liberty is given in the whole sphere thus constituted. Will, measuring the total amount of power, the inner limit of freedom on that side, expresses the fact of its existence and the necessity of some action and some direction, if there be a living soul; even though it should be no more than is necessary in order to maintain a stationary equilibrium of bare existence as an active power. This necessary some direction is given with the power itself, at the same time and from the same source: it is a part of the ultimate fact of existence. As self-directing cause, this soul may give direction, that is, choose, within the given range of liberty, or it may not: if it do not so act and choose, then the direction of the power must be determined by necessity; and the soul will act in the direction taken by the choice, if any be so taken, or if not, then by mere necessity and blind chance; or it will move by virtue of that more inward and original direction, which it has received and possesses with its primal existence: wherein may consist that guiding and controlling guardianship, or secret will and grace" of the Greater Providence, which may sometimes determine the direction and the choice, when the self-directing specialty, as such, is unable to decide and determine for itself, being for the time in a certain unresolvable quandary; which guardianship, again, may be that which is sometimes called Luck, and sometimes Destiny, being that same

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"destiny

(That hath to instrument this lower world,

And what is in 't"): — Temp., Act III. Sc. 3.

or, as Holinshed wrote, "the divine providence and appointment of God, as St. Augustine saith; for of other destiny, it is impossible to dream."1 In like manner writes Hooker,

about 1594, in the "Ecclesiastical Polity" (which this author may have read), "that the natural generation and process of all things receiveth order of proceeding from the settled stability of the divine understanding. This appointeth unto them their kinds of working; the disposition whereof in the purity of God's own knowledge and will is rightly termed by the name of Providence. The same being referred unto the things themselves here disposed by it, was wont by the ancient to be called natural Destiny. . . . . Nature therefore is nothing else but God's instrument." " And Hamlet was not far from this same doctrine, when he said:

"Ham. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting, That would not let me sleep: methought, I lay

Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,

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When our deep plots do pall; and that should teach us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

Hor.

That is most certain."

Act V. Sc. 2.

And so, this soul must act upon something out of the whole range and field of view, and either remain fixed in stupid equilibrium in one direction and upon the same thing, or it must shift upon the chosen things, or upon the destined things; as when a child first opens its eyes to the light, then needing much guidance and guardianship; and it will perceive, conceive, or act and do, something, or remain in stationary equilibrium; and that, too, by the determination of voluntary choice, sheer necessity, blind chance, or the all-seeing Destiny, out of the whole possi1 Chron. of Eng., I. 49.

2 Hooker's Works (Oxford, 1850,) I. 158.

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