303. Who does not affirm that such substances or materials as occur in the earth have been produced by the sun through its atmospheres? What person does not affirm it who considers that a perpetual series of intermediating agencies extends from the first entity to the last? And that nothing can come into being except from something prior to it, and in the final analysis from a first cause? This first cause is the sun of the spiritual world, and the first cause of that sun is the human God or the Lord. Now because the atmospheres are those prior agencies by which that sun manifests itself in final forms, and because those prior agencies continually decrease in activity and rarefaction in their descent to final forms, it follows that when their activity and rarefaction terminate in final forms, they become such substances and materials as exist in their earth-substances and materials which, from the atmospheres from which they arose, retain in them an impetus and endeavor to produce useful effects. People who postulate the creation of the universe and all of its constituents to have arisen not through a continual series of intermediating agencies from their first origin cannot but construct hypotheses severed and divorced from their causes. When examined by a mind that views matters more deeply, their hypotheses look not like a well-constructed house, but like a heap of stuff resembling rubble.