theoretic view was originally the aesthetic view, the prima philosophia,) where the idea of the world is to him the idea of the Cosmos, of majesty, of deity itself. Only where such a theory was the fundamental principle could there be conceived and expressed such a thought as that of Anaxagoras:—Man is born to behold the world.[1] The stand-point of theory is the stand-point of harmony with the world. The subjective activity, that in which man contents himself, allows himself free play, is here the sensuous imagination alone. Satisfied with this, he lets Nature subsist in peace, and constructs his castles in the air, his poetical cosmogonies, only out of natural materials. When, on the contrary, man places himself only on the practical stand-point and looks at the world from thence, making the practical stand-point the theoretical one also, he is in disunion with Nature; he makes Nature the abject vassal of his selfish interest, of his practical egoism. The theoretic expression of this egoistical, practical view, according to which Nature is in itself nothing, is this: Nature or the world is made, created, the product of a command. God said, Let the world be, and straightway the world presented itself at His bidding.[2]
Utilism is the essential theory of Judaism. The belief in a special Divine Providence is the characteristic belief of Judaism; belief in Providence is belief in miracle; but belief in miracle exists where Nature is regarded only as an object of arbitrariness, of egoism, which uses Nature only as an instrument of its own will and pleasure. Water divides or rolls itself together like a firm mass, dust is changed into lice, a staff into a serpent, rivers into blood, a rock into a fountain; in the same place it is both light and dark at once, the sun now stands still, now goes backward. And all these contradictions of Nature happen for the welfare of Israel, purely at the command of Jehovah, who troubles himself about nothing but Israel, who is
- ↑ In Diogenes (L. 1. ii. c. iii. § 6), it is literally, “for the contemplation of the sun, the moon and the heavens.” Similar ideas were held by other philosophers. Thus the Stoics also said:—“Ipse autem homo ortus est ad mundum contemplandum et imitandum.”—Cicero (De Natura Deorum).
- ↑ “Hebraei numen verbo quidquid videtur efficiens describunt et quasi imperio omnia creata tradunt, ut facilitatem in eo quod vult efficiendo, summamque ejus in omnia potentiam ostendant.”—Ps. xxxiii. 6. “Verbo Jehovae coeli facti sunt.”—Ps. cxlviii. 5. “Ille jussit eaque creata sunt.”—J. Clericus (Comment. in Mosem. Genes. i. 3).
