We say that everything has a beginning. This is one side of the matter.
There is another according to which everything is without a
beginning—beginnings, and endings also, being, but as it were, steps cut
in a slope of ice without which we could not climb it. They are for
convenience and the hardness of the hearts of men who make an idol of
classification, but they do not exist apart from our sense of our own
convenience.
It was a favourite saying with William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand]
that men cannot get rich by swopping knives. Nevertheless nature does
seem to go upon this principle. Everybody does eat everybody up. Man
eats birds, birds eat worms and worms eat man again. It is a vicious
circle, yet, somehow or other, there is an increment. I begin to doubt
the principle _ex nihilo nihil fit_.
We very much want a way of getting something out of nothing and back into
it again. Whether or no we ever shall get such a way, we see the clearly
perceptible arising out of and returning into the absolutely
imperceptible and, so far as we are concerned, this is much the same
thing. To assume an unknowable substratum as the source from which all
things proceed or are evolved is equivalent to assuming that they come up
out of nothing; for that which does not exist for us is for us nothing;
that which we do not know does not exist _qua_ us, and therefore it does
not exist. When I say “we,” I mean mankind generally, for things may
exist _qua_ one man and not _qua_ another. And when I say “nothing” I
postulate something of which we have no experience.
And yet we cannot say that a thing does not exist till it is known to
exist. The planet Neptune existed though, _qua_ us, it did not exist
before Adams and Leverrier discovered it, and we cannot hold that its
continued non-existence to my laundress and her husband makes it any the
less an entity. We cannot say that it did not exist at all till it was
discovered, that it exists only partially and vaguely to most of us, that
to many it still does not exist at all, that there are few to whom it
even exists in any force or fullness and none who can realise more than
the broad facts of its existence. Neptune has been disturbing the orbits
of the planets nearest to him for more centuries than we can reckon, and
whether or not he is known to have been doing so has nothing to do with
the matter. If A is robbed, he is robbed, whether he knows it or not.
In one sense, then, we cannot say that the planet Neptune did not exist
till he was discovered, but in another we can and ought to do so. _De
non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio_; as long,
therefore, as Neptune did not appear he did not exist _qua_ us. The only
way out of it is through the contradiction in terms of maintaining that a
thing exists and does not exist at one and the same time. So A may be
both robbed, and not robbed.
We consider, therefore, that things have assumed their present shape by
course of evolution from a something which, _qua_ us, is a nothing, from
a potential something but not an actual, from an actual nothing but a
potential not-nothing, from a nothing which might become a something to
us with any modification on our parts but which, till such modification
has arisen, does not exist in relation to us, though very conceivably
doing so in relation to other entities. But this Protean nothing,
capable of appearing as something, is not the absolute, eternal,
unchangeable nothing that we mean when we say _ex nihilo nihil fit_.
The alternative is that something should not have come out of nothing,
and this is saying that something has always existed. But the eternal
increateness of matter seems as troublesome to conceive as its having
been created out of nothing. I say “seems,” for I am not sure how far it
really is so. We never saw something come out of nothing, that is to
say, we never saw a beginning of anything except as the beginning of a
new phase of something pre-existent. We ought therefore to find the
notion of eternal being familiar, it ought to be the only conception of
matter which we are able to form: nevertheless, we are so carried away by
being accustomed to see phases have their beginnings and endings that we
forget that the matter, of which we see the phase begin and end, did not
begin or end with the phase.
Eternal matter permeated by eternal mind, matter and mind being functions
of one another, is the least uncomfortable way of looking at the
universe; but as it is beyond our comprehension, and cannot therefore be
comfortable, sensible persons will not look at the universe at all except
in such details as may concern them.