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Page 14
We do not fare much better when we speak of Causes and Effects than when
we speak of Nature. For the practical purposes of life we may use the
terms cause and effect conveniently, and we may fix a distinct meaning
to them, distinct enough at least to prevent all misunderstanding. But
the case is different when we speak of causes and effects as of Things.
All that we know is phenomena, as the Greeks called them, or appearances
which follow one another in a regular order, as we conceive it, so that
if some one phenomenon should fail in the series, we conceive that there
must either be an interruption of the series, or that something else
will appear after the phenomenon which has failed to appear, and will
occupy the vacant place; and so the series in its progression may be
modified or totally changed. Cause and effect then mean nothing in the
sequence of natural phenomena beyond what I have said; and the real
cause, or the transcendent cause, as some would call it, of each
successive phenomenon is in that which is the cause of all things which
are, which have been, and which will be forever. Thus the word Creation
may have a real sense if we consider it as the first, if we can conceive
a first, in the present order of natural phenomena; but in the vulgar
sense a creation of all things at a certain time, followed by a
quiescence of the first cause and an abandonment of all sequences of
Phenomena to the laws of Nature, or to the other words that people may
Use, is absolutely absurd.[A]
[A] Time and space are the conditions of our thought; but time
infinite and space infinite cannot be objects of thought,
except in a very imperfect way. Time and space must not in any
way be thought of when we think of the Deity. Swedenborg says,
"The natural man may believe that he would have no thought, if
the ideas of time, of space, and of things material were taken
away; for upon those is founded all the thought that man has.
But let him know that the thoughts are limited and confined in
proportion as they partake of time, of space, and of what is
material; and that they are not limited and are extended, in
proportion as they do not partake of those things; since the
mind is so far elevated above the things corporeal and worldly"
(Concerning Heaven and Hell, 169).
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF PALLAS]
Now, though there is great difficulty in understanding all the
passages of Antoninus, in which he speaks of Nature, of the changes of
things and of the economy of the universe, I am convinced that his sense
of Nature and Natural is the same as that which I have stated; and as he
was a man who knew how to use words in a clear way and with strict
consistency, we ought to assume, even if his meaning in some passages is
doubtful, that his view of Nature was in harmony with his fixed belief
in the all-pervading, ever present, and ever active energy of God. (ii.
4; iv. 40; x. 1; vi. 40; and other passages. Compare Seneca, De Benef.,
iv. 7. Swedenborg, Angelic Wisdom, 349-357.)
There is much in Antoninus that is hard to understand, and it might be
said that he did not fully comprehend all that he wrote; which would
however be in no way remarkable, for it happens now that a man may write
what neither he nor anybody can understand. Antoninus tells us (xii. 10)
to look at things and see what they are, resolving them into the
material [Greek: hyl�], the casual [Greek: aition], and the relation
[Greek: anaphora], or the purpose, by which he seems to mean something
in the nature of what we call effect, or end. The word Caus ([Greek:
aitia]) is the difficulty. There is the same word in the Sanscrit
(h�tu); and the subtle philosophers of India and of Greece, and
the less subtle philosophers of modern times, have all used this word,
or an equivalent word, in a vague way. Yet the confusion sometimes may
be in the inevitable ambiguity of language rather than in the mind of
the writer, for I cannot think that some of the wisest of men did not
know what they intended to say. When Antoninus says (iv. 36), "that
everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be,"
he might be supposed to say what some of the Indian philosophers have
said, and thus a profound truth might be converted into a gross
absurdity. But he says, "in a manner," and in a manner he said true; and
in another manner, if you mistake his meaning, he said false. When Plato
said, "Nothing ever is, but is always becoming" ([Greek: aei
gignetai]), he delivered a text, out of which we may derive something;
for he destroys by it not all practical, but all speculative notions of
cause and effect. The whole series of things, as they appear to us, must
be contemplated in time, that is in succession, and we conceive or
suppose intervals between one state of things and another state of
things, so that there is priority and sequence, and interval, and Being,
and a ceasing to Be, and beginning and ending. But there is nothing of
the kind in the Nature of Things. It is an everlasting continuity (iv.
45; vii. 75). When Antoninus speaks of generation (x. 26), he speaks of
one cause ([Greek: aitia]) acting, and then another cause taking up the
work, which the former left in a certain state, and so on; and we might
perhaps conceive that he had some notion like what has been called "the
self-evolving power of nature;" a fine phrase indeed, the full import of
which I believe that the writer of it did not see, and thus he laid
himself open to the imputation of being a follower of one of the Hindu
sects, which makes all things come by evolution out of nature or matter,
or out of something which takes the place of Deity, but is not Deity. I
would have all men think as they please, or as they can, and I only
claim the same freedom which I give. When a man writes anything, we may
fairly try to find out all that his words must mean, even if the result
is that they mean what he did not mean; and if we find this
contradiction, it is not our fault, but his misfortune. Now Antoninus is
perhaps somewhat in this condition in what he says (x. 26), though he
speaks at the end of the paragraph of the power which acts, unseen by
the eyes, but still no less clearly. But whether in this passage (x. 26)
lie means that the power is conceived to be in the different successive
causes ([Greek: aitiai]), or in something else, nobody can tell. From
other passages, however, I do collect that his notion of the phenomena
of the universe is what I have stated. The Deity works unseen, if we may
use such language, and perhaps I may, as Job did, or he who wrote the
book of Job. "In him we live and move and are," said St. Paul to the
Athenians; and to show his hearers that this was no new doctrine, he
quoted the Greek poets. One of these poets was the Stoic Cleauthes,
whose noble hymn to Zeus, or God, is an elevated expression of devotion
and philosophy. It deprives Nature of her power, and puts her under the
immediate government of the Deity.
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