Substance and Shadow

The mother fallacy which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular understanding, con- sists in attempting to conceive of an infinite power acting finitely, or under the limitations of space and time. Natural religion conceives that there was originally a space where, and a time when, creation was not. It conceives ac- cordingly that these two great idle wildernesses of time and space were inhabited by a mute inactive Deity alone ; and that this extraordinary degrades its Spiritual Contents. 69 Deity, tired at last of slumbering in eternal sloth, sent forth a great creative shout, or succession of shouts, which made the existing cosmos sud- denly appear as if it had always been.