to transmigrate into something better than he has been.

His

In entire accordance with this teaching, Schopenhauer maintains that the will to live must be rooted out by fasting, by voluntary poverty, by meek submission to injury, by absolute chastity, and, in a word, by the various exercises of asceticism. practice did not in the least correspond to this part of his theory, as he was particularly careful of his life, health, and money, had a most exclusive and selfish regard to his own comfort, and was decidedly the reverse of either meek or patient. But his ethical creed was perfectly orthodox in the Buddhistic sense, although his life was heretical. Von Hartmann is much less orthodox even in creed. He admits that it is hopeless to expect men to mortify the flesh and destroy life by ascetic practices, and would have his followers live just as other people do, in the trust that the world, owing to the delusions and disenchantments of history, will gradually, without individuals taking any care about the matter, work out its own salvation—that is, its own destruction. In the East, multitudes of men have earnestly striven to act on their pessimism. In the West, no one has as yet, so far as I am aware, seriously tried to do so.

The theory which we have been considering answers successfully few, if any, of the demands of the reason, the conscience, or the heart. It re

The

gards the world as irrational, and so, of course, does not explain it. It lays good and evil under the same condemnation. It seeks to empty the soul of the susceptibilities which it cannot satisfy, and to extirpate the desires which it cannot regulate. It tends to arrest all social progress. rest which it promises is that of the grave. We ought, I think, to carry away from the contemplation of it a deepened gratitude to God for the gift of that Gospel which has shown us the true cause of the world's misery and the true way of salvation. That even in our own day, and in Christian lands, the Gospel should by some have been deliberately rejected in the name of science and philosophy, and the Buddhist theory reproduced as a substitute for it, only shows in a glaring and terrible light that what is esteemed the most modern wisdom may be very ancient folly.1

1 See Appendix XXXIII.

LECTURE IX.

HISTORY OF PANTHEISM.

PANTHEISM is a word of very wide and very vague import. It has been used to designate an immense variety of systems which have prevailed in the East and the West in ancient and modern times. It is, in fact, a word so vague that few thinkers have defined it to their own satisfaction. There is no general agreement as to its meaning, and it has been applied to all sorts of doctrines, the worst and the best. It has been so understood as to include the lowest atheism and the highest theism-the materialism of Holbach and Büchner, and the spiritualism of St Paul and St John. There is a materialistic pantheism which cannot be rigidly separated from other materialism, and there has been much talk of late of a Christian pantheism which can only be distinguished from Christian theism if theism be identified, or rather confounded, with deism. The term pantheism ought, of course,

to be so understood, if possible, as to be altogether inapplicable to either atheistic or theistic systems; but we must remember that systems of thought, and especially systems of religion, are seldom, if ever, perfectly homogeneous and self-consistent. It is seldom, if ever, possible to refer them to a class with absolute accuracy, or to find that a definition exactly suits them. Even in regard to materialism, I had to remark that the only kind of system of which its history supplies no record is one which would answer truly to the name of materialism. In the same way there is probably no pure pantheism. The systems designated pantheistic are only more or less so; they contain likewise, in almost every instance, some atheistic, polytheistic, or theistic elements. It would be therefore unfair to judge any system solely and rigidly by a definition of pantheism. Each pantheistic system must be judged of in itself and as a whole in order to be impartially estimated. Why each system has come to be what it is, and why one system differs from another, are questions which the history of religious philosophy professes to answer, and which it is continually learning to answer in a more thorough and satisfactory manner, while the characteristic at once common to all the systems, and distinctive of them, is still not very clearly or exactly determined.

What is pantheism? The following is as definite

a general answer as I can give. Pantheism is the theory which regards all finite things as merely aspects, modifications, or parts of one eternal and self-existent being; which views all material objects, and all particular minds, as necessarily derived from a single infinite substance. The one absolute substance the one all-comprehensive being-it calls God. Thus God, according to it, is all that is; and nothing is which is not essentially included in, or which has not been necessarily evolved out of, God. It may conceive of the one substance in many and most dissimilar ways, but it is only pantheism on condition of conceiving of it as one. For example, there can only be materialistic pantheism where there is believed to be materialistic monism. Its adherents are those who regard matter as ultimately not an aggregate of atoms but a unity, who are so devoid of perspicacity as not to see that materialism and monism are in reality contradictory conceptions. Pantheism may also represent the derivation of the multiplicity of phenomena from the unity of substance as taking place in many very different ways, but it cannot be truly pantheism unless it represent it as a necessary derivation. It must regard it not as a freely willed production, but as an eternal process which could not have been other than what it has been. In order that there may be pantheism, monism and determinism must be combined. It is only then