world by means of the imagination and asks derisively: “How did it make it, through arrogance and audacity and in short through imagination”?[1] Spinoza combats the view of some who “without knowing it attribute imagination to God”[2] and contends that God “cannot form fictitious hypotheses.”[3] With this faith Spinoza courageously undertakes “to overthrow this doctrine of final cause (in nature) utterly.”[4] Such is the way of idealistic pantheists, ancient and modern.
There are a number of conclusions that follow from the doctrine of the eternal creation of the world. They are of interest to us not merely because they are logically deduced from it but especially because they are advocated by both the Neoplatonists and Mrs. Eddy and therefore argue the more strongly her dependence on them.
The first is that the world is necessarily created. There could be no other world and the one that is had to be. This necessity is that by which a thinking mind must have its object of thought, that by which a definite cause must have its definite effect, that by which a thing possesses its essential quality or qualities, that by which one correlative involves the other. Mrs. Eddy says: “What Deity foreknows Deity must foreordain.”[5] It is not a temporal but a logical foreknowing that Mrs. Eddy has in mind and any disciple of hers
