CAUSALITY OF PURE FORCE OF THE WILL.
124. In what does creation consist? How can God produce things from nothing? Such a thing is incomprehensible. This is the language of many who do not reflect that the same incomprehensibility is found in the exercise of secondary causality, both in the corporeal and in the incorporeal world. If we knew God in the intuitive manner in which, according to the Catholic dogma, the blessed see him in the mansion of glory, we might know intuitively the manner of the creation. As it is, we say that in so far as we can form any idea of the action of the Creator, he produces all things from nothing by the force of his will; which besides according with the teachings of religion, is in harmony with what we experience in ourselves. God wills, and the universe springs up out of nothing: how can this be understood? To him who asks this, I say: man wills, and his arm rises; he wills, and his whole body is in motion. How can this be understood? Here is a small, weak, and incomplete, but true image of the Creator: an intelligent being which wills, and a fact which appears. Where is the connection? If you cannot explain it to us in so far as concerns finite beings, how can you ask us to explain it with respect to the infinite being? The incomprehensibility of the conception of the motion of the body with the force of the will does not authorize us to deny the connection; therefore the incomprehensibility of the connection of a being which appears for the first time with the force of the infinite will cannot authorize us to deny the truth of the creation: on the contrary, the finding a similar thing in ourselves greatly strengthens the ontological arguments which demonstrate its necessity. In the dogmas of the Christian religion, besides what they reveal that is supernatural, we find at every step philosophical truths as profound as they are important.
125. The causality which relates to purely possible effects can only be understood by placing it in an intelligence. The cause which does not produce an effect, but which may produce it, involves a relation of the existent to the non-existent; the cause exists, the effect does not exist; the cause does not produce it, but may produce it; what is the relation of that which exists to that which does not exist? is not a relation without a term to which it relates, a contradiction? It is certainly, if abstracted from the intelligence: the intelligence alone can relate to that which does not exist; for it canthink the non-existent. A body can have no relation to a body which does not exist; but an intelligence may have a relation to that which does not exist, even knowing that it does not exist; we may ourselves wander at pleasure through the regions of pure possibility.
126. The will also participates of this character of the intellect. Desire relates to an enjoyment which is not, but which may be; we will and will not, we love and hate things that are often purely ideal, and whose identity we know perfectly well, still this does not prevent our willing them. Thus we desire things to happen which are not, and we may even desire things which we know to be impossible. We may wish to recover that which we know is lost forever; we may wish for the presence of a friend whom we know to be at so great a distance as to render his coming impossible; we may wish that time would stop or hurry on in conformity to our wants or our caprices.
127. Thus we find both the intellect and the will in relation to that which does not exist;—a relation which is not evenconceivable in a being destitute of intellect. This leads to an important result. The absolute beginning of any thing is not possible unless we conceive causality as having its root in the intellect. That which begins passes from not-being to being, and how is it possible that a being has produced inanothera transition from not-being to being, if the relation to theotherbefore it existed was intrinsically impossible? An intelligent being may think another although the other does not exist; but for an unintelligent being if the other does not exist inrealityit does not exist at all; consequently no relation to it is possible, any such relation that may be imagined is contradictory, and therefore it is absurd to suppose that which is not to begin to be.
128. This reasoning proves that in the origin of things there is an intelligent being, the cause of every thing, and that without this intelligence nothing could have begun. If something has begun, something must have existed from all eternity; and that which began wasknownby that which existed. Not admitting intelligence, beginning is absurd. Imagine in the origin of things a being without intelligence, its relations can only be to that which exists; it can have no relation to the non-existent; how then is it possible for the non-existent to begin to exist, through the action of the existent? In order that the non-existent may begin to be, some reason is necessary; for otherwise the beginning of one thing or of another, and even its beginning or not-beginning would be indifferent. Unless we suppose a being which knows that which does not exist, and may establish, so to speak, a communication with nothing, the being which does not exist can never exist.