017. II. Pantheism.
II. Pantheism.
1. Doctrinal Statement of Pantheism.—A history of pantheism would be necessary to the presentation of all its phases, variations. Variations of the theory seem very natural, we might say inevitable, in view of the wide place it has occupied in both time and territory. It flourished in Hindu philosophy long before the Christian era, and also in the earlier Greek philosophy, particularly in the Eleatic school. It appears in the Christian thought of the Middle Ages, in the speculations of the scholastics, and more fully in German philosophy. It was indeed inevitable that minds so widely separated, and of such variant speculative tendencies, should construct the doctrine in different forms. The outcome appears in some radical variations. There is a materialistic pantheism —so called—in which matter is all; and life and thought are forces of matter developed through its organizations. In this view matter is God, and life and thought are modes of his operation. There is an ideal pantheism, according to which God and the universe are merely mental creations. This theory logically leads to absolute egoism. Such mental creation must be the work of each individual mind, and each should account all others its own mental production, and then assert for itself the sum of existence. What then is God?
Spinoza, of the seventeenth century, is the representative of modern pantheism. He treated the subject in a philosophic manner never before attempted, and wrought it into a more exact and definite form than it had ever received. “Assuming the monistic doctrine, he laid down the proposition that the one and simple substance is known to us through the two attributes of infinite thought and infinite extension. Neither of these attributes implies personality, the essential elements of which are denied to the substance. The latter is self-operative, according to an inward necessity, without choice or reference to ends. All finite existences, whether material or mental, are merely phenomenal.”[146] This brief passage leads us to the central facts of the Spinozan pantheism. The facts, however, are simply placed side by side; not skillfully articulated; not scientifically combined. Thought is an act of personal mind, not an attribute of being; and the denial of personality to the being denies the possibility of the infinite thought. Extension is a spatial quality and must have a ground in spatially extended being. It thus appears that the two attributes are not coherent. Nor do the attributes seem integral to the one substance, but rather to hang loosely from it, and to give no expression of cither its reality or nature. Indeed, the one substance and the two attributes are pure assumptions of the theory.
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We may easily give the central and determining facts of the doctrine in its more exact form. Pantheism is rigidly monistic in principle. There is one substance or being. This principle is so fundamental that materialistic pantheism must speculatively transform matter into a sense of oneness, or fail to be pantheism. The one substance is without intelligence, sensibility or will, consciousness or personality. The one substance is blindly operative from an inward necessity. There is neither creation nor providence. In these facts pantheism is thoroughly antitheistic. The purely phenomenal character of all manifestations, whether in material, organic, or mental forms, is determined by the monistic principle of pantheism. The one substance is neither divisible nor creative, so that it can neither part with any thing nor produce any thing to constitute real being in any form of finite existence. All finite things, therefore, are mere modes of the one infinite substance, and have a merely phenomenal existence.
2. Monistic Ground of Pantheism.—The mind by a native tendency seeks to combine the manifold into classes, and even into unity. This is a fortunate tendency, and the beneficial results of its incitement appear in science and philosophy. But the mental process in such work has its imperative laws which must be observed; for, otherwise, instead of any valid result, we have mere hypothesis or assumption. This is the error of pantheism. Monism is not a truth of the reason: nor is it inductively reached and verified through a proper use of the relative facts. As we have elsewhere shown, the physical and mental facts known to us in experience and consciousness absolutely require distinct and opposite forms of being as their ground. Nor can matter and mind both be modes of the monistic ground which pantheism alleges. Both may be the creation of the one omnipotent personal being; but a mere nature, without personality and operative through a blind necessity, cannot manifest itself in such contradictory modes. The monistic ground of pantheism can no more account for the two classes of physical and mental facts than the material atoms of Democritus. Further, such a ground of the cosmos, a mere natura naturans, is disproved by the arguments adduced in proof of theism. The monistic ground of pantheism is a pure assumption, and an assumption contradicted by the facts of nature. The utter erroneousness of pantheism is manifest in this, that the monism which it maintains determines all finite existences to be mere modes of the one infinite substance, mere phenomena without any reality of being in themselves. The physical universe becomes as unsubstantial as in the extremest form of idealism. Mind becomes equally unreal. Neither can be thus dismissed from the realm of substantial existence. In the physical universe there is very real being. Not all is mere appearance. And every personal mind has in its own consciousness the absolute proof of real being in itself. Personal mind is not a mere phenomenon. The monism of pantheism is utterly false in doctrine.
3. Relation of Pantheism to Morality and Religion.—It is mostly admitted that pantheism is something more for the religious nature of man than atheism. We think this the case only with some minds. Pantheism is as really blank of all objective truth which can minister to the religious cravings of the soul as atheism itself; and only the devout whose religious fervor clothes God with many perfections which this doctrine denies him—only such souls can find spiritual nourishment in their conception of him. But so far they replace pantheism with theism. With most minds pantheism must be as really without God as atheism itself—just as it is in fact. There is no personality of God, no divine majesty for the soul’s reverence, no love for the inspiration of its own adoring love, no providence over us, no place for prayer, no knowledge of us, no heart of sympathy with us, no hand to help us, no Father in heaven. There can be no religious helpfulness in the idea of a being so utterly blank of all that the soul craves in God. In the doctrine of pantheism man is nothing in himself, a phenomenon only, a mere mode of the infinite, appearing for a while, and then vanishing forever. But such totality of God and nothingness of man are utterly exclusive of both morality and religion. Nothing in us called religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, is from any agency of our own. All is the operation of the infinite which manifests itself in such modes. “One essential and constituent element of pantheism is the suppressing of all particular causes, and the concentrating of all causality in a single being; that is, in God. This arises from another element of pantheism, yet more essential, which consists in suppressing all particular beings, and concentrating all existence in one sole being, which is God. If there is but one substance, there is but one cause; for without substance there can be only phenomena; and phenomena can only transmit action; they cannot produce it. Pantheism, laying down the principle, therefore, that there can be only one being and one cause, and that the universe is only a vast phenomenon, necessarily concentrates in God all liberty, even if it attributes liberty to him, and necessarily denies it every-where else. Man and all other beings, therefore, lose their quality of being and of cause, and become only attributes and acts of the divine substance and cause. Deprived thus of all proper causality, man is also deprived, at the same time, of all liberty, and, consequently, can have neither a law of obligation nor a controlling power over his own conduct. Such are the evident and necessary consequences of pantheism; and the pantheist, who does not adopt them either does not comprehend his own opinions or is voluntarily false to them.”[147] [147]
If God is not thus all, then he must be an utter blank. Pantheism must hold the one side or the other. The tendency is toward the blankness, which is not other than atheism. “In conceiving of God, the choice before a pantheist lies between alternatives from which no genius has as yet devised a real escape. God, the pantheist must assert, is literally every thing; God is the whole material and spiritual universe; he is humanity in all its manifestations; he is by inclusion every moral and immoral agent; and every form and exaggeration of moral evil, no less than every variety of moral excellence and beauty, is part of the all-pervading, all-comprehending movement of his universal life. If this revolting blasphemy be declined, then the God of pantheism must be the barest abstraction of abstract being; he must, as with the Alexandrian thinkers, be so exaggerated an abstraction as to transcend existence itself; he must be conceived of as utterly unreal, lifeless, non-existent; while the only real beings are these finite and determinate forms of existence whereof ‘nature’ is composed. This dilemma haunts all the historical transformations of pantheism, in Europe as in the East, to-day as two thousand years ago. Pantheism must either assert that its God is the one only existing being whose existence absorbs and is identified with the universe and humanity; or else it must admit that he is the rarest and most unreal of conceivable abstractions; in plain terms, that he is no being at all.”[148] Whichever alternative is taken, all grounds of morality and religion disappear. When pantheism is divested of all false coloring and set in the light of its own principles it is seen to be much at one with atheism.[149] [148]
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