ABSTRACT
Meanwhile, the notion of ‘creation from nothing’ also persisted, and was maintained even by a rational empiricist philosopher such as John Locke: ‘As when a new Particle of Matter doth begin to exist [. . .] and had before no Being, and this we call Creation’ (Essay on Human Understanding, II, 26.2; 1690). To be sure, alternative popular and learned traditions existed. Lord Rochester’s wittily subversive poem ‘Upon Nothing’ (1679) sports with the paradoxical possibility of creation out of a ‘no-thing’ that in its own way was a ‘some-thing’: ‘Nothing! . . . Thou hadst a being ere the world was made, . . . When primitive Nothing Something straight begot. / Then all proceeded from the great united What!’ Theologically, this accords with the minority view of creation from chaos, what Aristotle called Plenum (‘the Fullness’) as distinct from ‘the Void’. But the dominant official position was still divine creation ex nihilo and, as we shall see, this was locked on a collision course with materialist models of evolution in the nineteenth century.
