Outlines of Philosophy Author:Hermann Lotze Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. OF PRESERVATION. § 48. To ascribe the preservation of the world to a special divine activity, may seem to be a superfluous thought. In fact, th... more »e common opinion of natural philosophy amounts to this, that the world, when once in existence, maintains itself as a matter of course by the efficacy of the laws which have once gained prevalence in it. The utmost that is conceded is, that the origination of the world may be the object of an action, but not its continuation after it has once originated. The foregoing opinion only serves to remind us that we really have already before us, even with respect to creation, a difficulty of which, in the ordinary reflection, we are less sensible only in relation to this conception of preservation. To wit, the question is raised, in what way God, in the action of his will, has arrived at a decision concerning that which should be or should not be. The readiest answer, — namely that He has summoned into actual existence only that which is in itself possible, — as well as the other answer,—that He has summoned into actualexistence the best among many possible worlds, both contain the thought that what is good or not good, possible or not possible, has already been decided independently of the will of God; and therefore that, after all, there precedes God, the Supreme Principle, a certain realm of eternal truths as a still higher Principle, to which He together with his activity is now obliged to become subordinate. This strange idea is not improved by the immediate reply that, in the use of a distinction frequently made, we designate those ' eternal truths' merely as the ' content of God's understanding,' and not as a necessity foreign to Him and which stands over against Him objectively. No improvement of the idea is atta...« less