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Updated: May 17, 2025
The ancients as well as the moderns grasped this idea of the constitution of man by agglomeration of all terrestrial potentialities: the labors of Gall and Lavater were, if I may say so, only attempts at disintegration of the human syncretism, and their classification of our faculties a miniature picture of nature.
Pupils under 16 were assigned the topic Syncretism in the later pagan movement. A western librarian was asked by some girls for Kipling's "Many inventions" and "Day's work." Both were out. "Well, what other books of Kipling's on agriculture have you?" "Why, Kipling hasn't written any books on agriculture; he writes stories and poems."
But one would have thought, looking back through history, that the Alexandrians were not the only philosophers guilty of this shameful act of syncretism. Plato, one would have thought, was as great a sinner as they. So were the Hindoos.
But towards its philosophical sister there gradually sprang up among the unprejudiced public that hostility, which the empty and yet perfidious hypocrisy of set phrases never fails in the long run to awaken. That a presentiment of its own worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way of syncretism.
Theosophy is greatly at the mercy of the positive, practical temper; it will always find a prevailing competitor in the Christian doctrine of immortality. Whatever, moreover, explains the apparent inequalities of life in more simple and reasonable terms will cut the roots of it. The movement toward religious syncretism of which Bahaism is just now the expression will not be so easy to dispose of.
The spirit of syncretism manifests itself in this department of animism too; the immanent spirit of the earlier period becomes the presiding genius or local god of later times, and with the rise of the doctrine of separable souls we again reach the confines of animism pure and simple. Spirits in General.
Syncretism, as we saw, is very largely represented in Egyptian thought, and enters, indeed, into its very bone and marrow. In the ennead of a city the great gods may be arranged together after the fashion of a court where one or two rule over the rest; but in numberless passages we find the relations of gods adjusted in another way, by making them one.
This literary syncretism was especially marked in the mission tent at De Aar, where the forms were besprinkled with an infinite variety of magazines and pamphlets to such an extent indeed that in some cases the more vivid pages of a Family Herald would temporarily seduce the soldier's mind from the calmer pleasures of Mr. Moody's hymn book, and those who came to pray remained to read.
In Philo, as we have seen, the Hebraic and Hellenic conceptions of God touch at their summits in their noblest expressions; the conceptions of Plato are interfused with the imagination of the prophets. The Christian theology was a descent to a commoner Hellenism or one should rather call it a commoner syncretism as well as to an easier, impurer Hebraism.
The magic of the orient was amalgamated with it, Christian elements were added—in brief, the content of the chemistry of that time, which mainly had metallurgy as its starting point, took a vital part in the hybrid thought of syncretism in the first centuries after Christ.
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