God, and the principle of evolution is put aside in favour of the fiat of creation.  Yet for all this the aim of the narrator is not mainly a religious one.  Had he only meant to say that God made the world out of nothing, and made it good, he could have said so in simpler words, and at the same time more distinctly.  There is no doubt that he means to describe the actual course of the genesis of the world, and to be true to nature in doing so; he means to give a cosmogonic theory.  Whoever denies this confounds two different things—­the value of history for us, and the aim of the writer.  While our religious views are or seem to be in conformity with his, we have other ideas about the beginning of the world, because we have other ideas about the world itself, and see in the heavens no vault, in the stars no lamps, nor in the earth the foundation of the universe.  But this must not prevent us from recognising what the theoretical aim of the writer of Genesis i. really was.  He seeks to deduce things as they are from each other:  he asks how they are likely to have issued at first from the primal matter, and the world he has before his eyes in doing this is not a mythical world but the present and ordinary one.

The pale colour which generally marks the productions of the earliest reflection about nature, when they are not mythical theories, is characteristic of Genesis i. also.  We are indeed accustomed to regard this first leaf of the Bible as surrounded with all the charm that can be derived from the combination of high antiquity and childlike form. lt would be vain to deny the exalted ease and the uniform greatness that give the narrative its character.  The beginning especially is incomparable:  “The earth was without form and void, and darkness lay upon the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the water.  Then God said:  Let there be light, and there was light.”  But chaos being given, all the rest is spun out of it:  all that follows is reflection, systematic construction; we can easily follow the calculation from point to point.  The considerations are very simple which lead the writer to make first what is great appear, and then what is small; first the foundation and then that which exists upon it, the water before the fishes, heaven before the birds of heaven, land and plants before the animals.  The arrangement of the things to be explained stands here for the explanation; there is nothing more than a succession which proceeds from the simple to the complicated; there is no effort of fancy to describe the process more closely; everywhere cautious consideration which shrinks from going beyond generalities.  Only the framework of creation, in fact, is given; it is not filled up.  Hence also the form of the whole, the effect of which cannot be reproduced in an epitome; the formula gets the better of the contents, and instead of descriptions our ears are filled with logical definitions.  The graduated arrangement in separating particular things out of chaos indicates the awakening of a “natural” way of looking at nature, and of a reasoned reflection about natural objects, just as this is manifest in the attempts of Thales and his successors, which are also remarkable as beginnings of the theory of nature and of an objective interest in the things of the outer world, but further than this do not exactly rouse us to enthusiasm. 1