forms, Material Pantheism, sometimes called Hylozoism, and Spiritual Pantheism, or Psycho-zoism. Material Pantheism affirms the existence of Matter, but denies the existence of Spirit, or anything besides matter. Creation is not possible; the Phenomena of Nature and Life are not the result of a “fortuitous concourse of atoms,” as in Atheism, but of Laws in Nature itself. Matter is in a constant flux; but it changes only by laws which are themselves immutable. Of course this does not admit God as the Absolute or Infinite, but the sum-total of material things; He is limited both to the extension and the qualities of matter; He is merely immanent therein, but does not transcend material forms. This seems to have been the Pantheism of Strato of Lampsacus, of Democritus, perhaps of Hippocrates, and, as some think, though erroneously, of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and, in general, of the Eleatic Philosophers in Greece,[1] and of many others whose tendency is more spiritual.[2] Its philosophic form is the last result of an attempt to form an adequate Conception of God. It has sometimes been called Kosmo-theism, (World-Divinity,) but it gives us a world without a God.
Spiritual Pantheism affirms the existence of Spirit, and sometimes, either expressly or by implication, denies the existence of Matter. This makes all Spirit God; always the same, but ever unfolding into new forms, and therefore a perpetual Becoming; God is the absolute substance, with these two attributes—Thought and Extension. He is self-conscious in men; without self-consciousness in animals. Before the creation of men he was not self-conscious. All beside God is devoid of Substantiality. It is not but only APPEARS; its being is its being seen. This is Psycho-theism (Soul-Divinity). It gives us a God without a World, and He is the only cause that exists, the
- ↑ See Karsten, ubi sup., Vol. I. and II. See the opinions of these men ably summed up by Ritter, Geschichte der Philosophie, Vol. I. B. v., and Brandis, ubi sup., Vol. I. § 66—72. Cudworth has many fine observations on this sort of pantheism, Vol. I. Ch. iv. § 15—26, and elsewhere. He denies that this school make the deity corporeal, and charges this upon others. See Ch. III.
- ↑ See Jäsche, Der Pantheismus, &c., Vols. II. and III. passim, and the histories of Philosophy. If a man is curious to detect a pantheistic tendency he will find it in the Soul of-the-world, among the ancients, in the Plastic Nature of Cudworth, or the Hylarchic Principle of Henry More.
