Things are produced by the Divine Being
impressing his own ideas, eternal in his own mind, on a
pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax. Aristotle teaches
substantially the same doctrine. Things eternally exist as
matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say,
from materia informis to materia formata. Even the Christian
Platonists and Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation;
they assert it, indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of
revelation, not as a fact of science; and hence it is that their
theology and their philosophy never thoroughly harmonize, or at
least are not shown to harmonize throughout.
Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were
pantheists, and represented the universe either as God or as an
emanation from God. They had no proper conception of Providence,
or the action of God in nature through natural agencies, or as
modern physicists say, natural laws. If they recognized the
action of divinity at all, it was a supernatural or miraculous
intervention of some god. They saw no divine intervention in any
thing naturally explicable, or explicable by natural laws.
Having no conception of the creative act, they could have none of
its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
themselves.
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