that the All of Nature is believed to be coextensive with God-only then that the Divine Being is supposed to be fully or exhaustively expressed in the Divine manifestations.

According to the view I have just stated, no system which does not include determinism and exclude freedom is truly pantheistic. I refuse to have any controversy with certain so-called forms of pantheism which I do not regard as properly pantheistic, and which are certainly not anti-theistic. If matter could be resolved into force, and force could be reasonably inferred to be a phase or exertion of Divine power-if the laws of matter could be shown to be modes of God's agency, and the properties of matter modes of His manifestation-if Berkleyanism could be proved true,— some persons would say that, so far as the physical universe was concerned, pantheism had been established. I should say nothing of the kind, and should consider such an application of the term pantheism as not only unwarranted but injudicious, because unnecessarily provocative of religious prejudice. Physical nature is not represented by the view to which I refer as in the least degree more commensurate with the Divine power than by the common view. It may have been the free production of a volition, and may be an inexpressibly less adequate measure of the might of God, than a thought or word is of the power of man. It may

Y

have left in God an infinite energy which He can direct and apply according to the good pleasure of His will. In like manner, if all human minds were proved to exist—as some have supposed them to do-through the conditions of intelligence called primary ideas; and if these primary ideas could be ascertained to be-what some hold that they arethoughts of God, not only present in the mind of man, but constituting it what it is,-although Divine thought would thereby be represented as the substance, so to speak, of human minds, yet if a distinct individuality and real freedom could be justly attributed to these minds, pantheism in the strict and proper sense would not be established. The creature is so dependent on the Creator as to exist only in, through, and by Him. What amount of being it has in itself no man can tell. The quantity of being, the degree of being, possessed by the creature is certainly indeterminate. The finite cannot weigh itself in the balances of substance or being with the Infinite. It cannot ascertain what measure of being, what amount of substance, it has, as distinguished from the Infinite. Nor is it necessary that it should try to do so in order to preserve itself from pantheism and its errors. It will be sufficient for this purpose that it adhere to the plain testimony of consciousness and conscience, to the great facts of freedom and responsibility. In knowing ourselves as self-conscious and

self-acting with a certainty far greater than any reasoning to the contrary can produce, we have a guarantee that the pantheism which includes fatalism is false,—and there is, properly speaking, no other pantheism.

Pantheism is, as regards the relation of God to the world, the opposite extreme to what apologetic writers call deism. The latter theory represents God as a personal Being who exists only above and apart from the world, and the world as a something which, although created by God, is now independent of Him, and capable of sustaining and developing itself and performing its work, without His aid, in virtue of its own inherent energies. It not only distinguishes God from the world, but separates and excludes Him from the world. Pantheism, on the contrary, denies that God and nature either do or can exist apart. It regards God without nature as a cause without effect or a substance without qualities, and nature without God as an effect without a cause or qualities without a substance. It sees in the former an abstract conception of a power without efficiency-and in the latter, of a shadow which is cast by no reality. It therefore represents God and nature as eternally and necessarily coexistent, as the indissoluble phases of an absolute unity, as but the inner and outer side of the same whole, as but one existence under a double aspect. Theism takes

an intermediate view. It maintains with deism that God is a personal Being, who created the world intelligently and freely, and is above it and independent of it; but it maintains also with pantheism that He is everywhere present and active in the world, "upholding all things by the word of His power," and so inspiring and working in them that "in Him they live, and move, and have their being." It contradicts deism in so far as that system represents the universe as independent of God, and pantheism in so far as it represents God as dependent on the universe. It excludes what is erroneous and retains what is correct in both deism and pantheism. It is thus at once the pure truth and the whole truth.

Pantheism has appeared in a far greater variety of phases, and has presented a far richer combination of elements, than materialism. It has always endeavoured to comprehend and harmonise aspirations and facts, ideas and realities, the infinite and the finite. It has tried all methods of investigation and exposition, and has assumed a multitude of forms. It has had great constructive skill displayed on it, and has been adorned with all sorts of beauties. But just because its history is far broader and richer than that of materialism, it is also one which it is far more difficult worthily to delineate. It is not much to be wondered at that there should be no adequate history of pantheism.

I cannot attempt to trace even the general course of that history, and yet I cannot wholly ignore the subject, seeing that pantheism can only be understood through the study of its actual development. Nothing can be more delusive than an estimate of pantheism based exclusively on a definition or general description.1

I.

It is an error to regard India as the sole fountainhead of pantheism. Wherever we find traces of speculation on the origin of things, there we also find traces of pantheism. But nowhere was the soil so congenial to it as in India, and nowhere else has it flourished so luxuriantly. It has overspread the whole land - overgrown the whole Hindu mind and life. The pantheism of India, however, has always been to some extent combined or associated with theism. There are hymns in the Rig-Veda, relative to creation, which are distinctly more monotheistic than pantheistic. In many passages of the Upanishads, the national epics, and the philosophical soutras and commentaries, the Universal Soul is certainly not described as strictly impersonal. But theism in India was never either strong or pure, and has never been

1 See Appendix XXXIV.