Page:A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy.djvu/416

movers of the heavenly bodies come before the spheres which they move as their causes. The spheres come before the terrestrial elements for the same reason. The elements are followed by the things composed of them. And among these too there is a certain order. Plants come before animals, aquatic animals before aerial, aerial before terrestrial, and the last of all is man, as the most perfect of sublunar creatures. All this he reads into the account of creation in Genesis. Thus the light spoken of in the first day represents the angels or separate Intelligences or movers of the spheres, and they are distinguished from the darkness there, which stands for the heavenly bodies as the matters of their movers, though at the same time they are grouped together as one day, because the form and its matter constitute a unit. The water, which was divided by the firmament, denotes the prime formless matter, part of which was changed into the matter of the heavenly bodies, and part into the four terrestrial elements. Form and matter are also designated by the terms "Tohu" and "Bohu" in the second verse in Genesis, rendered in the Revised Version by "without form" and "void." And so Gersonides continues throughout the story of creation, into the details of which we need not follow him.³⁵⁷

The concluding discussion in the Milhamot is devoted to the problem of miracles and its relation to prophecy. Maimonides had said that one reason for opposing the Aristotelian theory of the eternity of the world is that miracles would be an impossibility on that assumption. Hence Maimonides insists on creation ex nihilo, though he admits that the Platonic view of a pre-existent matter may be reconciled with the Torah. Gersonides, who adopted the doctrine of an eternal matter, finds it necessary to say by way of introduction to his treatment of miracles that they do not prove creation ex nihilo. For as was said before all miracles exhibit a production of something out of something and not out of nothing.

To explain the nature of miracles, he says, and their authors, it is necessary to know what miracles are. For this we must take the Biblical records as our data, just as we take the data of our senses in determining other matters. On examining the miracles of the Bible we find that they may be classified into those which involve a change of substance and those in which the substance remains the same and the change is one of quality or quantity. An example of the former is