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A bird does not 'fall to the ground' unless wounded, and if it falls it dies. Jesus had looked pityingly on the great mystery, the woes of the creatures, and had stayed Himself on the thought of the all-embracing working of God. The very dying sparrow, with broken wing, had its place in that universal care. God is 'immanent' in nature.
But even the Stoics found themselves compelled to abandon the common conception of goodness. And in Spinoza the motive of panlogism is clear and uncompromising. God as the immanent order of the world is good only in that he is necessary good only in so far as he satisfies the logical interest and enables the mind to understand.
A law connects changing terms and is immanent in what it governs.
But the empirical aspect of this teaching was pushed into the background through the teachings of Socrates and Plato. The "myth" regained some of its pristine power in a new kind of way; and "God transcendent of the world and immanent in the world" came prominently forward as a doctrine of the universe and of life.
We know too little about the religious beliefs and customs of this prehistoric age to be able to judge whether such objects were regarded merely as symbols of the deity or as having immanent in them some divine or superhuman power; but survivals, especially of an early tree and pillar cult, are probably to be traced in historic Greece, and even to the present day.
And thus naturalism in its last stages may sometimes be quite devout, and may assure us that it is compelled to deny only the transcendental and not the immanent God, the Divine being enthroned above the world, but not the living God dwelling within it. And ever anew Goethe’s verse is quoted: What God would outwardly alone control, And on His finger whirl the mighty Whole?
Instinctively, Anna rejected this conjecture. But what need was there of assuming an explicit statement, when every breath they had drawn for the last weeks had been charged with the immanent secret? As she looked back over the days since Darrow's first arrival at Givre she perceived that at no time had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been accidentally disclosed.
But this immanent God is also seen to be transcendent. He is in nature and far beyond it. Vast as nature is, it is limited. God is the unlimited. Within this region of transcendence is room for all His gracious activities as distinguished from His natural activities; room for marvel and miracle if He will and we need.
These errors would not cease to act imperceptibly upon the work of revision intended to apply the remedy. It is from within, by an effort of immanent purgation, that the necessary reform must be brought about.
But if we look from the inside, with the spirit or "with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty of acting," we shall escape from the bondage of the mechanistic view into the freedom of the larger truth of the ceaseless creative view; we shall see the unity of the creative impulse which is immanent in life and which, "passing through generations, links individuals with individuals, species with species, and makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter."
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