The Origin of Matter

That substances or matters, such as are on the earth, were produced from the sun by its atmospheres, is affirmed by all who think that there are perpetual mediations from the first to the last; and that nothing can exist but from a prior self, and at length from the First. And the First is the sun of the spiritual world; and the First of that sun is God Man, or the Lord. Now as the atmospheres are the prior things by which that sun presents itself in ultimates, and as those prior things continually decrease in activity and expansion to ultimates, it follows that when their activity and expansion cease in the ultimates they become substances and matters such as are on the earth; which retain from the atmospheres, whence they originated, an effort and endeavour to produce uses. Those who do not evolve the creation of the universe and all things therein by continual mediations from the First, cannot but build hypotheses that are incoherent and disconnected from their causes, which, when examined by a mind that looks interiorly into things, appear not as houses but as heaps of rubbish. (DLW n. 303)

The origin of earths, treated of in the preceding article, may show that in the substances and matters of which they consist there is nothing of the Divine in itself, but that they are deprived of all that is Divine in itself; being, as was there said, the ends and terminations of the atmospheres, whose heat has ended in cold, whose light in darkness, and whose activity in inertness. But still they have brought with them, by continuation from the substance of the spiritual sun, that which was there from the Divine, which was the sphere surrounding God Man or the Lord. From this sphere, by continuation from the sun, proceeded, by means of the atmospheres, the substances and matters of which the earths consist. (DLW n. 305)