displays itself in all the various systems of religion and their accordant theologies.
This theme of literal creation is so inwrought into the structure of historic thinking, that it will recjuire a long struggle on the part of criticism to get rid of it. Through the influence of the Church and the philosophical schools, it may be said to have become in fact institutional, so that combating it is like fighting organised civilisation itself. Yet one can make the truth clear, that only by the dislodgment of it is the success of the deeper principle possible which is the real soul of civilisation, — I mean the principle of moral life, the life of duty freely followed.
If we examine the great historic systems, we see that with reference to this creationism they may be thrown into the following four main groups:
First, those that are either (1) the direct theological expressions of the post-exilic Hebraism which, taking occasion from the Eternal Dualism of the Parsees, and correcting it by a modified recognition of the Supreme Being of the older Orientalisms, taught a dualism of a monarchotheistic sort — of a Creator, and a creation summoned into existence at a certain date by his sheer fiat (e.g., the systems of Augustine, Aquinas, and Scotus), or else are (2) philosophical enterprises, undertaken in all rational good-faith, but silently engendered by the influence of this Hebraic doctrine even when they greatly modify it (e.g., the systems of Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, the Deists, and, with all his protests, at the last pinch even Kant).
Second, those that for this dualistic and miraculous exercise of efficient causation, for creation ex nihilo, substitute the older but more rationally continuous view of the immanence of the creation in a monistic Creator or Eternal Source, and thus carry us back into the current of pantheistic emanationism dating from primeval times. E.g., the systems of Erigena, Nicolas Cusanus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Fichte,
