Abram Herbert Lewis - Spiritual Sabbathism

THE TEMPORAL AND THE ETERNAL 53
The mood of naturalism Is known to us all in
some elementary form. As children we have all
wondered, with Mark Twain's boy, whether the
stars were supernaturally created, or whether "they
just naturally happened." The enormous advances
of physical science have cast suspicion upon the
word "supernatural," just as they have cast suspicion
upon the word "sacred." The scientist repeats
the remark of Laplace, that in the construction
of a mechanism of the heavens, the hypothesis
of God is not needed. When, therefore, the scientific
mind is confronted with abstract systems like
Hegel's or Bradley's, it is tempted to swing to the
opposite extreme and declare that time and matter
and energy are real, and that nothing else is. There
is energy and there are the real forms in which it
is expressed—matter, motion, change, time—and
there is nothing else. God is an imaginary being,
"a gaseous vertebrate." Consciousness is something
given off by energy, or it is potential energy,
or it is a product of the imagination (whatever that
is) ; it is like the fly on the balance wheel, imagining
that it makes the wheel revolve; it is the noise of
the whistle, not the force in the whistle; It Is the
delusion of a stone which, being thrown from an
unknown hand, awakes in flight and imagines itself
a bird; it is not a reality but an epiphenomenon.