self-identical, independent, and relieved from their attachment to the thing. Still, as they are the characters of the thing distinguished from one another (as reflected-into-self), they are not themselves things, if things be concrete; but only existences reflected into themselves as abstract characters. They are what are called Matters.
Nor is the name 'things' given to Matters, such as magnetic and electric matters. They are qualities proper, a reflected Being,--one with their Being,--they are the character that has reached immediacy, existence: they are 'entities.'
To elevate the properties, which the Thing has, to the independent position of matters, or materials of which it consists, is a proceeding based upon the notion of a Thing: and for that reason is also found in experience. Thought and experience however alike protest against concluding from the fact that certain properties of a thing, such as colour, or smell, may be represented as particular colouring or odorific matters, that we are then at the end of the inquiry, and that nothing more is needed to penetrate to the true secret of things than a disintegration of them into their component materials. This disintegration into independent matters is properly restricted to inorganic nature only. The chemist is in the right therefore when, for example, he analyses common salt or gypsum into its elements, and finds that the former consists of muriatic acid and soda, the latter of sulphuric acid and calcium. So too the geologist does well to regard granite as a compound of quartz, felspar, and mica. These matters, again, of which the thing consists, are themselves partly things, which in that way may be once more reduced to more abstract matters.
Sulphuric acid, for example, is a compound of sulphur and oxygen. Such matters or bodies can as a matter of fact be exhibited as subsisting by themselves: but frequently we find other properties of things, entirely wanting this self-subsistence, also regarded as particular matters.
Thus we hear caloric, and electrical or magnetic matters spoken of.
Such matters are at the best figments of understanding. And we see here the usual procedure of the abstract reflection of understanding.
Capriciously adopting single categories, whose value entirely depends on their place in the gradual evolution of the logical idea, it employs them in the pretended interests of explanation, but in the face of plain, unprejudiced perception and experience, so as to trace back to them every object investigated. Nor is this all. The theory, which makes things consist of independent matters, is frequently applied in a region where it has neither meaning nor force. For within the limits of nature even, wherever there is organic life, this category is obviously inadequate. An animal may be said to consist of bones, muscles, nerves, &c.: but evidently we are here using the term 'consist' in a very different sense from its use when we spoke of the piece of granite as consisting of the above-mentioned elements. The elements of granite are utterly indifferent to their combination: they could subsist as well without it. The different parts and members of an organic body on the contrary subsist only in their union: they cease to exist as such, when they are separated from each other.
127.] Thus Matter is the mere abstract or indeterminate reflection-into-something-else, or reflection-into-self at the same time as determinate; it is consequently Thinghood which then and there is,--the subsistence of the thing. By this means the thing has on the part of the matters its reflection-into-self (the reverse of § 125); it subsists not on its own part, but consists of the matters, and is only a superficial association between them, an external combination of them.
128.] (γ) Matter, being the immediate unity of existence with itself, is also indifferent towards specific character. Hence the numerous diverse matters coalesce into the one Matter, or into existence under the reflective characteristic of identity. In contrast to this one Matter these distinct properties and their external relation which they have to one another in the thing, constitute the _Form_,--the reflective category of difference, but a difference which exists and is a totality.
This one featureless Matter is also the same as the Thing-by-itself was: only the latter is intrinsically quite abstract, while the former essentially implies relation to something else, and in the first place to the Form.
* * * * * The various matters of which the thing consists are potentially the same as one another. Thus we get one Matter in general to which the difference is expressly attached externally and as a bare form. This theory which holds things all round to have one and the same matter at bottom, and merely to differ externally in respect of form, is much in vogue with the reflective understanding. Matter in that case counts for naturally indeterminate, but susceptible of any determination; while at the same time it is perfectly permanent, and continues the same amid all change and alteration. And in finite things at least this disregard of matter for any determinate form is certainly exhibited. For example, it matters not to a block of marble, whether it receive the form of this or that statue or even the form of a pillar. Be it noted however that a block of marble can disregard form only relatively, that is, in reference to the sculptor: it is by no means purely formless. And so the mineralogist considers the relatively formless marble as a special formation of rock, differing from other equally special formations, such as sandstone or porphyry. Therefore we say it is an abstraction of the understanding which isolates matter into a certain natural formlessness. For properly speaking the thought of matter includes the principle of form throughout, and no formless matter therefore appears anywhere even in experience as existing. Still the conception of matter as original and pre-existent, and as naturally formless, is a very ancient one; it meets us even among the Greeks, at first in the mythical shape of Chaos, which is supposed to represent the unformed substratum of the existing world. Such a conception must of necessity tend to make God not the Creator of the world, but a mere world-moulder or demiurge. A deeper insight into nature reveals God as creating the world out of nothing. And that teaches two things. On the one hand it enunciates that matter, as such, has no independent subsistence, and on the other that the form does not supervene upon matter from without, but as a totality involves the principle of matter in itself. This free and infinite form will hereafter come before us as the notion.
129.] Thus the Thing suffers a disruption into Matter and Form. Each of these is the totality of thinghood and subsists for itself. But Matter, which is meant to be the positive and indeterminate existence, contains, as an existence, reflection-on-another, every whit as much as it contains self-enclosed being. Accordingly as uniting these characteristics, it is itself the totality of Form. But Form, being a complete whole of characteristics, _ipso facto_ involves reflection-into-self; in other words, as self-relating Form it has the very function attributed to Matter. Both are at bottom the same. Invest them with this unity, and you have the relation of Matter and Form, which are also no less distinct.
130.] The Thing, being this totality, is a contradiction. On the side of its negative unity it is Form in which Matter is determined and deposed to the rank of properties (§ 125). At the same time it consists of Matters, which in the reflection-of-the-thing-into-itself are as much independent as they are at the same time negatived. Thus the thing is the essential existence, in such a way as to be an existence that suspends or absorbs itself in itself. In other words, the thing is an Appearance or Phenomenon.
The negation of the several matters, which is insisted on in the thing no less than their independent existence, occurs in Physics as _porosity._ Each of the several matters (colouring matter, odorific matter, and if we believe some people, even sound-matter,--not excluding caloric, electric matter, &c:) is also negated: and in this negation of theirs, or as interpenetrating their pores, we find the numerous other independent matters, which, being similarly porous, make room in turn for the existence of the rest. Pores are not empirical facts; they are figments of the understanding, which uses them to represent the element of negation in independent matters.
The further working-out of the contradictions is concealed by the nebulous imbroglio in which all matters are independent and all no less negated in each other.--If the faculties or activities are similarly hypostatised in the mind, their living unity similarly turns to the imbroglio of an action of the one on the others.
These pores (meaning thereby not the pores in an organic body, such as the pores of wood or of the skin, but those in the so-called 'matters,' such as colouring matter, caloric, or metals, crystals, &c.) cannot be verified by observation. In the same way matter itself,--furthermore form which is separated from matter,--whether that be the thing as consisting of matters, or the view that the thing itself subsists and only has proper ties,--is all a product of the reflective understanding which, while it observes and professes to record only what it observes, is rather creating a metaphysic, bristling with contradictions of which it is unconscious.
B.--APPEARANCE.
131.] The Essence must appear or shine forth. Its shining or reflection in it is the suspension and translation of it to immediacy, which, whilst as reflection-on-self it is matter or subsistence, is also form, reflection-on-something-else, a subsistence which sets itself aside. To show or shine is the characteristic by which essence is distinguished from being,--by which it is essence; and it is this show which, when it is developed, shows itself, and is Appearance. Essence accordingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, but just because it is the essence which exists--the existence is Appearance (Forth-shining).
* * * * * Existence stated explicitly in its contradiction is Appearance. But appearance (forth-shining) is not to be confused with a mere show (shining). Show is the proximate truth of Being or immediacy. The immediate, instead of being, as we suppose, something independent, resting on its own self, is a mere show, and as such it is packed or summed up under the simplicity of the immanent essence. The essence is, in the first place, the sum total of the showing itself, shining in itself (inwardly); but, far from abiding in this inwardness, it comes as a ground forward into existence; and this existence being grounded not in itself, but on something else, is just appearance.
In our imagination we ordinarily combine with the term appearance or phenomenon the conception of an indefinite congeries of things existing, the being of which is purely relative, and which consequently do not rest on a foundation of their own, but are esteemed only as passing stages. But in this conception it is no less implied that essence does not linger behind or beyond appearance. Rather it is, we may say, the Infinite kindness which lets its own show freely issue into immediacy, and graciously allows it the joy of existence. The appearance which is thus created does not stand on its own feet, and has its being not in itself but in something else. God who is the essence, when He lends existence to the passing stages of His own show in Himself, may be described as the goodness that creates a world: but He is also the power above it, and the righteousness, which manifests the merely phenomenal character of the content of this existing world, whenever it tries to exist in independence.
Appearance is in every way a very important grade of the logical idea.
It may be said to be the distinction of philosophy from ordinary consciousness that it sees the merely phenomenal character of what the latter supposes to have a self-subsistent being. The significance of appearance however must be properly grasped, or mistakes will arise.
To say that anything is a _mere_ appearance may be misinterpreted to mean that, as compared with what is merely phenomenal, there is greater truth in the immediate, in that which _is._ Now in strict fact, the case is precisely the reverse. Appearance is higher than mere Being,--a richer category because it holds in combination the two elements of reflection-into-self and reflection-into-another: whereas Being (or immediacy) still mere relationlessness and apparently rests upon itself alone. Still, to say that anything is _only_ an appearance suggests a real flaw, which consists in this, that Appearance is still divided against itself and without intrinsic stability. Beyond and above mere appearance comes in the first place Actuality, the third grade of Essence, of which we shall afterwards speak.
In the history of Modern Philosophy, Kant has the merit of first rehabilitating this distinction between the common and the philosophic modes of thought. He stopped half-way however, when he attached to Appearance a subjective meaning only, and put the abstract essence immovable outside it as the thing-in-itself beyond the reach of our cognition. For it is the very nature of the world of immediate objects to be appearance only. Knowing it to be so, we know at the same time the essence, which, far from staying behind or beyond the appearance, rather manifests its own essentiality by deposing the world to a mere appearance. One can hardly quarrel with the plain man who, in his desire for totality, cannot acquiesce in the doctrine of subjective idealism, that we are solely concerned with phenomena. The plain man, however, in his desire to save the objectivity of knowledge, may very naturally return to abstract immediacy, and maintain that immediacy to be true and actual. In a little work published under the title, _A Report, clear as day, to the larger Public touching the proper nature of the Latest Philosophy: an Attempt to force the reader to understand,'_ Fichte examined the opposition between subjective idealism and immediate consciousness in a popular form, under the shape of a dialogue between the author and the reader, and tried hard to prove that the subjective idealist's point of view was right. In this dialogue the reader complains to the author that he has completely failed to place himself in the idealist's position, and is inconsolable at the thought that things around him are no real things but mere appearances. The affliction of the reader can scarcely be blamed when he is expected to consider himself hemmed in by an impervious circle of purely subjective conceptions. Apart from this subjective view of Appearance, however, we have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental.
132.] The Apparent or Phenomenal exists in such a way, that its subsistence is _ipso facto_ thrown into abeyance or suspended and is only one stage in the form itself. The form embraces in it the matter or subsistence as one of its characteristics. In this way the phenomenal has its ground in this (form) as its essence, its reflection-into-self in contrast with its immediacy, but, in so doing, has it only in another aspect of the form. This ground of its is no less phenomenal than itself, and the phenomenon accordingly goes on to an endless mediation of subsistence by means of form, and thus equally by non-subsistence. This endless inter-mediation is at the same time a unity of self-relation; and existence is developed into a totality, into a world of phenomena,--of reflected finitude.
133.] Outside one another as the phenomena in this phenomenal world are, they form a totality, and are wholly contained in their self-relatedness. In this way the self-relation of the phenomenon is completely specified, it has the Form in itself: and because it is in this identity, has it as essential subsistence. So it comes about that the form is Content: and in its mature phase is the Law of the Phenomenon. When the form, on the contrary, is not reflected into self, it is equivalent to the negative of the phenomenon, to the non-independent and changeable: and that sort of form is the indifferent or External Form.
The essential point to keep in mind about the opposition of Form and Content is that the content is not formless, but has the form in its own self, quite as much as the form is external to it. There is thus a doubling of form. At one time it is reflected into itself; and then is identical with the content. At another time it is not reflected into itself, and then is the external existence, which does not at all affect the content. We are here in presence, implicitly, of the absolute correlation of content and form: viz. their reciprocal revulsion, so that content is nothing but the revulsion of form into content, and form nothing but the revulsion of content into form. This mutual revulsion is one of the most important laws of thought. But it is not explicitly brought out before the Relations of Substance and Causality.
Form and content are a pair of terms frequently employed by the reflective understanding, especially with a habit of looking on the content as the essential and independent, the form on the contrary as the unessential and dependent. Against this it is to be noted that both are in fact equally essential; and that, while a formless _content_ can be as little found as a formless _matter,_ the two (content and matter) are distinguished by this circumstance, that matter, though implicitly not without form, still in its existence manifests a disregard of form, whereas the content, as such, is what it is only because the matured form is included in it. Still the form comes before us sometimes as an existence indifferent and external to content, and does so for the reason that the whole range of Appearance still suffers from externality. In a book, for instance, it certainly has no bearing upon the content, whether it be written or printed, bound in paper or in leather. That however does not in the least imply that apart from such an indifferent and external form, the content of the book is itself formless. There are undoubtedly books enough which even in reference to their content may well be styled formless: but want of form in this case is the same as bad form, and means the defect of the right form, not the absence of all form whatever. So far is this right form from being unaffected by the content that it is rather the content itself. A work of art that wants the right form is for that very reason no right or true work of art: and it is a bad way of excusing an artist, to say that the content of his works is good and even excellent, though they want the right form. Real works of art are those where content and form exhibit a thorough identity. The content of the Iliad, it may be said, is the Trojan war, and especially the wrath of Achilles. In that we have everything, and yet very little after all; for the Iliad is made an Iliad by the poetic form, in which that content is moulded. The content of Romeo and Juliet may similarly be said to be the ruin of two lovers through the discord between their families: but something more is needed to make Shakespeare's immortal tragedy.
In reference to the relation of form and content in the field of science, we should recollect the difference between philosophy and the rest of the sciences. The latter are finite, because their mode of thought, as a merely formal act, derives its content from without.
Their content therefore is not known as moulded from within through the thoughts which lie at the ground of it, and form and content do not thoroughly interpenetrate each other. This partition disappears in philosophy, and thus justifies its title of infinite knowledge. Yet even philosophic thought is often held to be a merely formal act; and that logic, which confessedly deals only with thoughts _quâ_ thoughts, is merely formal, is especially a foregone conclusion. And if content means no more than what is palpable and obvious to the senses, all philosophy and logic in particular must be at once acknowledged to be void of content, that is to say, of content perceptible to the senses. Even ordinary forms of thought however, and the common usage of language, do not in the least restrict the appellation of content to what is perceived by the senses, or to what has a being in place and time. A book without content is, as every one knows, not a book with empty leaves, but one of which the content is as good as none. We shall find as the last result on closer analysis, that by what is called content an educated mind means nothing but the presence and power of thought. But this is to admit that thoughts are not empty forms without affinity to their content, and that in other spheres as well as in art the truth and the sterling value of the content essentially depend on the content showing itself identical with the form.
134.] But immediate existence is a character of the subsistence itself as well as of the form: it is consequently external to the character of the content; but in an equal degree this externality, which the content has through the factor of its subsistence, is essential to it. When thus explicitly stated, the phenomenon is relativity or correlation: where one and the same thing, viz. the content or the developed form, is seen as the externality and antithesis of independent existences, and as their reduction to a relation of identity, in which identification alone the two things distinguished are what they are.
135.] (α) The immediate relation is that of the Whole and the Parts. The content is the whole, and consists of the parts (the form), its counterpart. The parts are diverse one from another. It is they that possess independent being. But they are parts, only when they are identified by being related to one another; or, in so far as they make up the whole, when taken together. But this 'Together' is the counterpart and negation of the part.
Essential correlation is the specific and completely universal phase in which things appear. Everything that exists stands in correlation, and this correlation is the veritable nature of every existence. The existent thing in this way has no being of its own, but only in something else: in this other however it is self-relation; and correlation is the unity of the self-relation and relation-to-others.
The relation of the whole and the parts is untrue to this extent, that the notion and the reality of the relation are not in harmony. The notion of the whole is to contain parts: but if the whole is taken and made what its notion implies, _i.e._ if it is divided, it at once ceases to be a whole. Things there are, no doubt, which correspond to this relation: but for that very reason they are low and untrue existences. We must remember however what 'untrue' signifies. When it occurs in a philosophical discussion, the term 'untrue' does not signify that the thing to which it is applied is non-existent. A bad state or a sickly body may exist all the same; but these things are untrue, because their notion and their reality are out of harmony.
The relation of whole and parts, being the immediate relation, comes easy to reflective understanding; and for that reason it often satisfies when the question really turns on profounder ties. The limbs and organs, for instance, of an organic body are not merely parts of it: it is only in their unity that they are what they are, and they are unquestionably affected by that unity, as they also in turn affect it. These limbs and organs become mere parts, only when they pass under the hands of the anatomist, whose occupation, be it remembered, is not with the living body but with the corpse. Not that such analysis is illegitimate: we only mean that the external and mechanical relation of whole and parts is not sufficient for us, if we want to study organic life in its truth. And if this be so in organic life, it is the case to a much greater extent when we apply this relation to the mind and the formations of the spiritual world. Psychologists may not expressly speak of parts of the soul or mind, but the mode in which this subject is treated by the analytic understanding is largely founded on the analogy of this finite relation. At least that is so, when the different forms of mental activity are enumerated and described merely in their isolation one after another, as so-called special powers and faculties.
136.] (β) The one-and-same of this correlation (the self-relation found in it) is thus immediately a negative self-relation. The correlation is in short the mediating process whereby one and the same is first unaffected towards difference, and secondly is the negative self-relation, which repels itself as reflection-into-self to difference, and invests itself (as reflection-into-something-else) with existence, whilst it conversely leads back this reflection-into-other to self-relation and indifference. This gives the correlation of Force and its Expression.
The relationship of whole and part is the immediate and therefore unintelligent (mechanical) relation,--a revulsion of self-identity into mere variety. Thus we pass from the whole to the parts, and from the parts to the whole: in the one we forget its opposition to the other, while each on its own account, at one time the whole, at another the parts, is taken to be an independent existence. In other words, when the parts are declared to subsist in the whole, and the whole to consist of the parts, we have either member of the relation at different times taken to be permanently subsistent, while the other is non-essential. In its superficial form the mechanical nexus consists in the parts being independent of each other and of the whole.
This relation may be adopted for the progression _ad infinitum,_ in the case of the divisibility of matter: and then it becomes an unintelligent alternation with the two sides. A thing at one time is taken as a whole: then we go on to specify the parts: this specifying is forgotten, and what was a part is regarded as a whole: then the specifying of the part comes up again, and so on for ever. But if this infinity be taken as the negative which it is, it is the _negative_ self-relating element in the correlation,--Force, the self-identical whole, or immanency; which yet supersedes this immanency and gives itself expression;--and conversely the expression which vanishes and returns into Force.
Force, notwithstanding this infinity, is also finite: for the content, or the one and the same of the Force and its out-putting, is this identity at first only for the observer: the two sides of the relation are not yet, each on its own account, the concrete identity of that one and same, not yet the totality. For one another they are therefore different, and the relationship is a finite one. Force consequently requires solicitation from without: it works blindly: and on account of this defectiveness of form, the content is also limited and accidental.
It is not yet genuinely identical with the form: not yet is it _as_ a notion and an end; that is to say, it is not intrinsically and actually determinate. This difference is most vital, but not easy to apprehend: it will assume a clearer formulation when we reach Design. If it be overlooked, it leads to the confusion of conceiving God as Force, a confusion from which Herder's God especially suffers.
It is often said that the nature of Force itself is unknown and only its manifestation apprehended. But, in the first place, it may be replied, every article in the import of Force is the same as what is specified in the Exertion: and the explanation of a phenomenon by a Force is to that extent a mere tautology. What is supposed to remain unknown, therefore, is really nothing but the empty form of reflection-into-self, by which alone the Force is distinguished from the Exertion,--and that form too is something familiar. It is a form that does not make the slightest addition to the content and to the law, which have to be discovered from the phenomenon alone. Another assurance always given is that to speak of forces implies no theory as to their nature: and that being so, it is impossible to see why the form of Force has been introduced into the sciences at all. In the second place the nature of Force is undoubtedly unknown: we are still without any necessity binding and connecting its content together in itself, as we are without necessity in the content, in so far as it is expressly limited and hence has its character by means of another thing outside it.
(1) Compared with the immediate relation of whole and parts, the relation between force and its putting-forth may be considered infinite. In it that identity of the two sides is realised, which in the former relation only existed for the observer. The whole, though we can see that it consists of parts, ceases to be a whole when it is divided: whereas force is only shown to be force when it exerts itself, and in its exercise only comes back to itself. The exercise is only force once more. Yet, on further examination even this relation will appear finite, and finite in virtue of this mediation: just as, conversely, the relation of whole and parts is obviously finite in virtue of its immediacy. The first and simplest evidence for the finitude of the mediated relation of force and its exercise is, that each and every force is conditioned and requires something else than itself for its subsistence. For instance, a special vehicle of magnetic force, as is well known, is iron, the other properties of which, such as its colour, specific weight, or relation to acids, are independent of this connexion with magnetism. The same thing is seen in all other forces, which from one end to the other are found to be conditioned and mediated by something else than themselves. Another proof of the finite nature of force is that it requires solicitation before it can put itself forth. That through which the force is solicited, is itself another exertion of force, which cannot put itself forth without similar solicitation. This brings us either to a repetition of the infinite progression, or to a reciprocity of soliciting and being solicited. In either case we have no absolute beginning of motion.
Force is not as yet, like the final cause, inherently self-determining: the content is given to it as determined, and force, when it exerts itself, is, according to the phrase, blind in its working. That phrase implies the distinction between abstract force-manifestation and teleological action.
(2) The oft-repeated statement, that the exercise of the force and not the force itself admits of being known, must be rejected as groundless. It is the very essence of force to manifest itself, and thus in the totality of manifestation, conceived as a law, we at the same time discover the force itself. And yet this assertion that force in its own self is unknowable betrays a well-grounded presentiment that this relation is finite. The several manifestations of a force at first meet us in indefinite multiplicity, and in their isolation seem accidental: but, reducing this multiplicity to its inner unity, which we term force, we see that the apparently contingent is necessary, by recognising the law that rules it. But the different forces themselves are a multiplicity again, and in their mere juxtaposition seem to be contingent. Hence in empirical physics, we speak of the forces of gravity, magnetism, electricity, &c, and in empirical psychology of the forces of memory, imagination, will, and all the other faculties.
All this multiplicity again excites a craving to know these different forces as a single whole, nor would this craving be appeased even if the several forces were traced back to one common primary force. Such a primary force would be really no more than an empty abstraction, with as little content as the abstract thing-in-itself. And besides this, the correlation of force and manifestation is essentially a mediated correlation (of reciprocal dependence), and it must therefore contradict the notion of force to view it as primary or resting on itself.
Such being the case with the nature of force, though we may consent to let the world be called a manifestation of divine forces, we should object to have God Himself viewed as a mere force. For force is after all a subordinate and finite category. At the so-called renascence of the sciences, when steps were taken to trace the single phenomena of nature back to underlying forces, the Church branded the enterprise as impious. The argument of the Church was as follows. If it be the forces of gravitation, of vegetation, &c. which occasion the movements of the heavenly bodies, the growth of plants, &c., there is nothing left for divine providence, and God sinks to the level of a leisurely on-looker, surveying this play of forces. The students of nature, it is true, and Newton more than others, when they employed the reflective category of force to explain natural phenomena, have expressly pleaded that the honour of God, as the Creator and Governor of the world, would not thereby be impaired. Still the logical issue of this explanation by means of forces is that the inferential understanding proceeds to fix each of these forces, and to maintain them in their finitude as ultimate. And contrasted with this deinfinitised world of independent forces and matters, the only terms in which it is possible still to describe God will present Him in the abstract infinity of an unknowable supreme Being in some other world far away. This is precisely the position of materialism, and of modern 'free-thinking,' whose theology ignores what God is and restricts itself to the mere fact _that_ He is. In this dispute therefore the Church and the religious mind have to a certain extent the right on their side. The finite forms of understanding certainly fail to fulfil the conditions for a knowledge either of Nature or of the formations in the world of Mind as they truly are. Yet on the other side it is impossible to overlook the formal right which, in the first place, entitles the empirical sciences to vindicate the right of thought to know the existent world in all the speciality of its content, and to seek something further than the bare statement of mere abstract faith that God creates and governs the world. When our religious consciousness, resting upon the authority of the Church, teaches us that God created the world by His almighty will, that He guides the stars in their courses, and vouchsafes to all His