As to calling forth a creation, and a sudden one, all creation demands time, and time neither recedes nor advances at the word of command.

So, in the world without us, plastic nature obeys laws the order and exercise of which cannot be interfered with by the hand of man.

But after fulfilling, as it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have never yet been able to classify them.

I do not speak of man's faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to confine itself within the Word,--a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists to explain creation by a word to which they give an inverse power.

The smallest atom of their subsistence, namely, the grain of rice, from which a creation issues and in which alternately creation again is held, presented to their minds so perfect an image of the creative word, and of the abstractive word, that to them it was easy to apply the same system to the creation of worlds.
The majority of men content themselves with the grain of rice sown in the first chapter of all the Geneses.