MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM
In response to your invitation,[1] I willingly take part in discussing the question, Is pantheism the legitimate outcome of modern science? While turning it over for some months past, I have become more and more convinced that any satisfactory answer to it depends upon clearing up the meaning of its terms. What is pantheism? And what actual features in modern science can give colour to the suspicion that pantheism is its proper result? Or if such a suspicion is well founded, what leads us to regard it with a certain aversion? If science establishes or clearly tends to establish the pantheistic view, why should this stir in us alarms? Is there some secret hostility to the interests of human nature in a pantheistic
- ↑ The essay was read at the Concord School of Philosophy, July, 1885. Under the title “Is Modern Science Pantheistic?” it was printed in the Overland Monthly, December, 1885, and reprinted, with some slight changes, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. xix, No. 4, nominally for October, 1885, but not issued till the spring of 1886. It formed a member in a “symposium” to which the other contributors were Mr. John Fiske, Dr. F. E. Abbot, Dr. A. P. Peabody, Dr. Edmund Montgomery, and Dr. W. T. Harris. Mr. Fiske has published his contribution in his well-known work, The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge; and Dr. Abbot his, in his volume called Scientific Theism.
