atheistic. The idealism of acosmic pantheism, grounded as it is in the consciousness of the Universal Substance, has naturally a universal and in so far an objective character. The idealism of atheistic pantheism, on the contrary, has no warrant except the thought in a particular consciousness, now this, now that, and no means of raising this warrant into a character even common to a class of conscious beings, much less into unrestricted universality; hence it is particular and subjective.
Pantheism, then, in both its forms, is not only a more comprehensive view of the world than either materialism or any one-sided idealism, inasmuch as it provides a chance for both of them, but it is also a deeper and more organic view, because it does bring in, at least in a symbolic fashion, the reality of a universal. This advantage, however, it does not secure with any fulness except in its acosmic form. Indeed, the atheistic form is so closely akin to the less organic theories of materialism and subjective idealism that we may almost say we do not come to pantheism proper until we pass out of the atheistic sort and get into the acosmic.
An additional gain afforded by pantheism, eminently by the acosmic sort, is the idea of an intimate union of the First Principle with the world of particular beings: the creative Cause is stated as spontaneously manifesting its own nature in its
