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sent into hospitals and asylums, not to prison. The judge must yield up his place to the physician! Who would not then begin to tremble for the safety of society? Who does not perceive the moral danger involved in Materialism, according to which all human action, even that of the mind and spirit, is subordinate to the law of nature, and man no longer does what he ought to do, but what he must do,—according to which, therefore, all the great and noble acts performed in the world's history are nothing but the necessary products of certain bodily impulses and conditions? But the whole matter assumes an exceedingly tragico-comical aspect when we find these people desirous to be thought the "squatters of advancing civilisation," without observing that they are its gravediggers; and see them swaggering as the heralds of freedom and humanity, whilst it does not occur to them that they are the apostles of the most brutal tyranny, and that the practical aim of their theory is that the best-organized beast, called man, should sit alone on the throne of unfettered self-deification and unchecked self-gratification. For if man is nothing but a beast without a future, and organized merely for the full enjoyment of his present existence, then all that we have hitherto stupidly considered to be virtue is only a sin against our destiny! Justice, duty, honour, self-sacrifice, compassion, etc., are morbid secretions of certain deranged lobes of the brain! What good is my fellow-man to me? To subject and tyrannize all others is the only aim which reasonable man can pursue! Such maxims carried into practice would render society a mere congeries of atoms.

In good sooth, the materialists are the most dangerous enemies of progress that the world has ever seen. For all progress in the last resort depends on the ideal of an Infinite Perfection, to which the God-derived spirit of man aspires. He who destroys this ideal destroys progress also. But this ideal is destroyed when health and sensual enjoyments are held up to our race as the sole aim of life, within which we are to move in an eternal circle!

In the face of these apparent consequences, we are in this case, too, really led to doubt whether these gentlemen themselves believe what they are trying to palm off upon us. Why do they seek to work upon the people by means of lectures

and books? The proper way to convert people to their opinions would be to make them eat the same food as they do! Just imagine a soulless professor, with the utmost ingenuity, demonstrating to soulless students from his professorial chair that they have no souls! Is not the wiseacre contradicted out of his own mouth by every word he utters, since every one of his words is addressed to the souls of his audience? In fact, my honoured hearers, if any one among you has brought with him flesh, blood, bone, some phosphorus, and nothing else, I would make bold to intimate to him in a friendly way that all arguments, as far as he is concerned, are but lost time.

Doubtless, however, there is something true and justifiable in Materialism. All that exists has some right to its existence. We would not deny this. Materialism calls our attention more closely than in former days to the profound interpenetration of our soul-life and our bodily condition, and to the fact that the activity of our mind and will is partly determined by bodily functions,-the circulation of the blood, the action of the nerves, etc.; in a word, to the unquestionably very important influence exercised by material agents, both within and without us, on our mental condition. Materialism may thus teach a lesson, especially to those one-sided idealists whom we were before compelled to blame for looking upon their reason as something always absolutely free in its nature, without believing in their dependence on material influences. This one-sided spiritualism of necessity degenerates in time into its opposite, that is, into Materialism. The latter, then, forms a wholesome counterbalance to that system of philosophy in which the "idea" was all in all, and in which the inquirer was so taken up by speculations of pure reason as not to have time for any consideration of nature. Any future sound system of natural philosophy will have to seek the right course between these two extremes.

The Holy Scriptures, on the other hand, which observe an equal distance between these extremes, fully recognise this truth of the interpenetration of our soul-life with our bodily condition. They point out, with much emphasis, the predominance which, by means of sin, the flesh has attained over the spirit, the constant bondage and danger which the soul incurs from sensual inclinations,-in a word, "the law of sin

in the members" (Rom. vii.); and in teaching our natural subjection to the power of sensuality, they bring clearly before our eyes the truth which is involved in the materialistic denial of freewill. But the Holy Scriptures do not lead us into a comfortless fatalism, but show us the way in which the spirit may again attain to predominance and freedom. But it is one thing to acknowledge these bodily influences and another to identify the soul with them,—to deny its separate existence, and thus to tread into the dust man's crown, the basis of all that is truly great and honourable, all that is high and God-like, in and above the world.

If theories of this kind appeared only among morally fickle and degraded nations, whose whole development, or rather misdevelopment, would naturally lead to them, we might, though with deep compassion, look on quietly. But the busy efforts of many, in modern times, to naturalize a materialistic popular philosophy, even on our German soil, must be characterized by every one who is aware of the profound ideality of the German mind, and of German Christian science and education, and who knows how for the last ten centuries Germans have done battle for the highest moral and spiritual treasures of life, as an act of treason against the original and true nature of German research and science! To similar opponents in his own time, Plato gave the counsel, "first to reform, so that then they might be capable of being taught." The Christian spirit of Germany, inheriting as it does the ideal impulses of the mind of ancient Greece, should give the same answer to the theories we have been considering.

III.-PANTHEISM.

Pantheism derives its name from the motto, ev Kai Tâv, i.e. One and All, which was first brought into vogue by the Greek philosopher Xenophanes. According to this view, God is the universe itself; beyond and outside the world He does not exist, but only in the world. He is the Soul, the Reason and the Spirit of the world, and all nature is His body. In reality, God is everything, and beside him there is nothing. Thus, making God the Soul of the world, Pantheism is distinguished,

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on the one hand, from Materialism, according to which God and nature are immediately identical; and, on the other hand, from Theism, that is, from the belief in a self-conscious, personal God, who created the world and guides even its most minute details. For the main point of pantheistic belief is that this Soul of the world is not a personal, self-conscious Being, who appears in his totality in any one phenomenon or at any one moment, so as to comprehend himself or become comprehensible for us, but that it is only the One ever same Essence which, filling everything and shaping everything, lives and moves in all existing things, and is revealed in all that is visible, yet is Itself never seen. Goethe has depicted it in the oft-quoted words :

"I rise and fall on the waves of life,
I move to and fro in action's strife;
Birth and the grave,-an eternal sea,-
A web that changes alternately,—

A life which must ever glow and burn,-
On the whirring loom of life, in turn
All these I weave, and the Godhead see
Clad in a robe of vitality."

The fact that this view of the world is first met with among nations with polytheistic religions, such as the Hindus and Greeks, points to an internal relationship between Polytheism and Pantheism which is often overlooked. The two seem opposed; but, when accurately considered, they are in principle the same. Just as, e.g., the ordinary Greeks believed that there was a nymph or a naiad in every tree and in every fountain, and, in addition to the Olympian gods, peopled all nature with innumerable demi-gods; so also, in every being and in every phenomenon the Greek pantheistic philosopher saw a manifestation of the Deity. Pantheism and Polytheism are but a higher and a lower form of one and the same view of the world. The former is the refined, the latter the vulgar mode of deifying nature; the former seeks after unity amid the individual phenomena, the latter stops short at and personifies them.

We have previously alluded to the fact that this One, Allinspiring, yet Unconscious, is characterized by Pantheism in various ways, as the Soul of the world, as universal Substance,

as the Moral Order of the world, as Absolute Spirit, etc.1 The father of occidental Pantheism in modern times was the Jew Spinoza (1632-1677). "I have," says he, " opinions as to God and nature entirely different from those which modern Christians are wont to vindicate. To my mind God is the immanent (that is, the intramundane), and not the transcendent (that is, the supramundane) Cause of all things; that is, the totality of finite objects is posited in the Essence of God, and not in His Will. Nature, considered per se, is one with the essence of God." According to Spinoza, God is the one universal Substance, in which all distinctions and all isolated qualifications are resolved into unity, to which per se we cannot therefore ascribe either understanding or will. He ridicules those who make out that God acts according to a purpose, and look upon the world as a product of the divine will or intellect. "God does not act in pursuance of a purpose, but only according to the necessity of His nature. Everything follows from nature with the same logical necessity as that by which the attributes of a thing follow from its idea, or from the nature of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles." This expresses the fundamental view of every form of Pantheism. Even Hegel's conception of God, as the absolute Idea or the absolute Spirit which, in eternal self-movement, proceeds from itself and becomes nature, and then again reverting to Itself, becomes a self-conscious spirit, is, in truth, only another name for the same thing. For Spinoza himself distinguishes between nature" begetting" and "begotten" (natura naturans et naturata). The latter is the ever-varying phenomenal world, the "former" the intermittent bourne from which these phenomena take their rise, and into which they sink again.

From this we can already see how much falls to the ground if the personality of God be given up. In the first place, we can no longer acknowledge a creation of the world as a free

There is even a form of Pantheism, or rather of semi-Pantheism, in which the personality of God is to some extent preserved, which looks upon the world as an efflux from the Deity, and hence as being of His essence, but not coextensive with Him. Thus, for instance, the doctrine of emanations in the Indian Vedas. But here, too, the personality of God is dangerously compromised by the necessity of the natural process in which these emanations take place. Since, however, this view has no representatives of importance in modern times, we shall confine our attention to the above-mentioned form of Pantheism.

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