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Updated: June 1, 2025
For it is to be remembered that Spinoza was the first Pantheist who was also a prophet, in the sense of speaking out the divine voice of the infinite Universe to its human constituent parts. Not that I would minimize the religious fervour of the Neo-Platonists: it is their Pantheism that seems to have been imperfect.
And if the Pantheist in these days be asked, "What interpretation then do you propose?" his answer is, "I propose none. I take things as they are. In their totality they are unknowable, as, indeed, even science finds they are in their infinitesimal parts." But we need not on this account lose "the divinity that shapes our ends."
The thought, IS HE A PANTHEIST? took its place. Had she not surprised him in an act of worship? In that wide outspreading of the lifted arms, was he not worshipping the whole, the Pan? Sky and stars and mountains and sea were his God! She walked aghast, forgetful of a hundred things she had heard him say that might have settled the point.
With many, however, it assumed a form which at once engendered the worst errors of Gnosticism; and Gnosticism was, at first, considered a Christian heresy; so that a man might be a pantheist, of the worst kind, and still call himself Christian. St.
Thus the ninth century saw a rationalist and a pantheist at the court of a Christian king. Like Democritus, he maintained the eternity of matter. Like a Buddhist, he believed that God is all things and all things are God. Such doctrines were not to be tolerated, even in an age when theological speculations did not usually provoke persecution.
The animist and pantheist represent different stages but not different methods of thought. For the former, every natural object which impresses him is alive; the latter concurs in this view, only he thinks the universe is instinct with one and the same life displaying itself in infinite variety.
Being plunged into a state of settled gloom, I then became acutely anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic, atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely discussed the new school of domestic relationships.
Ideals exhausted themselves in the void; Victorian England, very unwisely, would have no more to do with idealists in politics. And this, chiefly, because there had been about these great poets a young and splendid sterility; since the pantheist Shelley was in fact washed under by the wave of the world, or Byron sank in death as he drew the sword for Hellas.
On such a system I do not see how there can be anything but God, and, therefore, notwithstanding his aversion to the name, count Hegel a Pantheist. Goethe and Wordsworth, in many inspired passages of their poetry, echo the faith of Spinoza.
This parallel of religion and morals is to be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self meant a sort of Nirvana. Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic. No philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza.
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