Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 371, 372—“We have to a certain extent an aid to the thought of absolute creation in our own free volition, which, as absolutely originating and determining, may be taken as the type to us of the creative act.” We speak of “the creative faculty” of the artist or poet. We cannot give reality to the products of our imaginations, as God can to his. But if thought were only substance, the analogy would be complete. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:467—“Our thoughts and volitions are created ex nihilo, in the sense that one thought is not made out of another thought, nor one volition out of another volition.” So created substance may be only the mind and will of God in exercise, automatically in matter, freely in the case of free beings (see pages 90, 105-110, 383, and in our treatment of Preservation). Beddoes: “I have a bit of _Fiat_ in my soul, And can myself create my little world.” Mark Hopkins: “Man is an image of God as a creator.... He can purposely create, or cause to be, a future that, but for him, would not have been.” E. C. Stedman, Nature of Poetry, 223—“So far as the Poet, the artist, is creative, he becomes a sharer of the divine imagination and power, and even of the divine responsibility.” Wordsworth calls the poet a “serene creator of immortal things.” Imagination, he says, is but another name for “clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And reason in her most exalted mood.” “If we are ‘_gods_’ (_Ps. 82:6_), that part of the Infinite which is embodied in us must partake to a limited extent of his power to create.” Veitch, Knowing and Being, 289—“Will, the expression of personality, both as originating resolutions and moulding existing material into form, is the nearest approach in thought which we can make to divine creation.”