"The conception is that an ideal or image was first created in the
Divine Mind, and into that image as a mold the divine energy was
centered, and as a result created forms appeared in the visible
universe. In other words, there was first an ideal or picture in the
Divine Mind, and the object was created according to that divine ideal
or image.
The first Biblical account we have of an idealism we find in Genesis, in
the great account of creation. The author proceeds as follows:
"These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were
created in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and
every plant of the field, before it was in the earth, and every herb of
the field before it grew."
Here is the declaration that every plant of the field before it was in
the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew, had been created.
If God created the plant before it was in the earth, and the herb before
it grew, He must have created them as thought images or ideals in His
own Divine Mind. They could not have been created elsewhere than in His
own mind, if God was omnipresent and filled the universe with His
presence.
This was God's method of creation, first the ideal, then the ideal
expressed as a visible form of creation. Thus in the first account of
creation, found in the Hebrew Bible, we discover the declaration of an
idealism. The idealism of the great Creator of the heavens and of the
earth. Here is the first record that ideals or thought images preceded
the external and visible forms of Nature. Every plant and every herb was
first a thought, an ideal, and then became an entity in the visible
works of God.
Later it was said: "The universe is the infinite utterance of an
infinite number of thoughts from an infinite and thinking source."
"There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material
forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and
alkali, pre-exist in necessary ideas in the mind of God," says Emerson.
It was said by Judge Troward: "If we realize that all visible things
must have their origin in spirit, then the whole creation around us is
the standing evidence that the starting-point of all things is in
thought images or ideas, for no other action than the formation of such
images can be conceived of spirit, prior to its manifestation in
matter."
Listen to Carlyle: "What is Nature? Why do I not name thee God? Art thou
not the living garment of God?"
All that man has accomplished in his long history, from the stupendous
monuments of architecture to systems of laws, governments,
institutions, arts, and civilization itself, is the fruitage
of thought, the result of ideals, which first found existence in mind
only. All objective things first had a corresponding picture in mind and
intelligence. The bridge first existed in the mind of the engineer,
before it was objectivized in steel and iron. The sculptor saw the image
of the perfect statue, before the marble was quarried from the hills.
The locomotive was first a mental image, before it became a throbbing
and panting expression of that ideal."
Abel Leighton Allen
http://website.lineone.net/~newthought/tmontinx.htm
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