Читать книгу Modern cosmogonies онлайн

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Experience tells us of continual change in ourselves and whatever surrounds us. Reason teaches us that its minute momentary effects, if pursued backward for an indefinite time, must sum up to a prodigious total. No limit, that is to say, can be put to the difference between what is and what was. Yet the machinery of modification must somehow have been set going. An initial state is prescribed by logical necessity. And the start was made on certain terms—it was 'conditioned.' But the conditioned implies the absolute; ordinances, an enactive power. The inevitableness of the connection has been more or less obscurely perceived wherever men have tried to establish some kind of accord between phenomena and intuition, with results legible in the wavering outlines of many primitive cosmogonies. Only, however, in the Hebrew Scriptures has the idea of Creation been realized in all its fulness and freedom; elsewhere the gods invoked to bring the world into existence themselves demanded a birth-history, a theogony being the usual and necessary prelude to a cosmogony.