CHAPTER III. EXEGETICAL REMARKS UPON THE CREATION AND PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD. In the Norse as in all mythologies, the beginning of creation is a cosmogony presenting many questions difficult of solution. The natural desire of knowledge asks for the origin of all things; and as the beginning always remains inexplicable, the mind tries to satisfy itself by penetrating as far into the primeval forms of matter and means of sustaining life as possible. We follow the development of the tree back to the seed and then to the embryo of the seed, but still we are unable to explain how a miniature oak can exist in scarcely more than a mere point in the acorn. We even inspect the first development of the plant with the microscope, but we acquire knowledge not of the force, but only of its manifestations or phenomena. Such was also the experience of our ancestors, when they inquired into the origin of this world. They had the same desire to know, but were not so well provided with means of finding out, as we are with our microscopic, telescopic, and spectrum analysis instruments. The first effort of the speculative man is to solve the mystery of existence. The first question is: How has this world begun to be? What was in the beginning, or what was there before there yet was anything? In the Greek mythology many forms seem to arise out of night, which seems to shroud them all. Thus in the Norse mythology the _negative_ is the first, a _conditio sine qua non_, space we might say, which we must conceive of as existing, before anything can be conceived as existing in it. Our ancestors imagined in the beginning only a yawning gap in which there was absolutely nothing. Wonderfully enough they said that the one side of this immense gulf extended to the north and the other to the south, as though there could be such things as _north_ and _south_ before the creation of the world. The north side was cold, the south warm; and thus we find by closer inspection that this nothing still was something, that contained in itself opposite forces, cold and heat, force of contraction and force of expansion, but these forces were in a state of absolute inertia. Thus also the Greek chaos: ... rudis indigestaque moles, Nec quidquam nisi pondus iners, congestaque eodem Non bone junctarum discordia semina rerum. We cannot conceive how a body containing two forces can be a _pondus iners_, for every force is infinite and cannot rest unless it is prisoned by its opposite force, and this is then strife. The Norse view is, philosophically speaking, more correct. Here the opposite forces are separated by a gulf, and as they cannot penetrate the empty space, they remain inert.