See the essays on method, in the 'Friend'. [6] Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters;--and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties. Now this is either--first, equivalent to the assertion of a 'prima et nuda materia', so happily ridiculed by the author of 'Hudibras', [7] and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives:--or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used 'proleptice' in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is 'res noumenon'; the thing is 'res phenomenon' [8] A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance,--'causa sub-faciens'. P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space--long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique:--and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent. Ib. 2. p. 250. In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.