In order to learn, we must attend; in order to profit by what we have learnt, we must think—that is, reflect. He only thinks who reflects.
Coleridge.
THE traditional belief in "Two first principles;" namely, God and matter, in contradistinction to one divine Principle, as taught in Christian Science, seems to have been held by philosophers and theologians in varied forms since the days of Plato and Aristotle. The combination of Monotheism and Pantheism included in the elder Pliny's belief that "There is but one God, and this God manifests Himself in nature," represents a still prevalent, though impossible theory, vainly attempting to reconcile matter with Mind. He argued that "Nature and Nature's works are one." "If there are other universes, they are natural; that is to say, a part of Nature. God rules them all according to law which He himself cannot violate. It is useless to supplicate Him and absurd to worship Him, for to do these things is to degrade Him with the thought, He is like us." The foregoing implication that God is the author of the physical universe, in which the climax of creation, according to the Psalmist, was conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity, is, to borrow a phrase from the classic naturalist, hardly "complimentary to God."
