But in the hands of others the philosophy of evolution becomes an affirmative idealism: the theory of the Unknowable gives way to the theory of Cosmic Theism, the Persistent Force to the Omnipresent Mind. God is made immanent in Nature — as directly present throughout the immensity of the universe as each person’s mind is to its own body. Every member in the vast whole, nay, every atom, is represented ,as instinct with God; yes, as being God in some limitation or other, and in some victorious expression or other, of his incessant energy. As declared in the threadbare lines of Pope, —
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
All things are accordingly but aspects in the self-vision of the one and only eternal Consciousness, whose ceaseless rending of his successive disguises, that he may at length appear to himself in his proper image, unconfined and unobscured, is the explanatory cause of that ever changing, ever broadening, and ever deepening stream of existences which we have come to name the Drama of Evolution: —
They change and perish all, but He remains;
A moment guess’d — then back behind the fold
Immerst of darkness round the Drama roll’d
Which, for the pastime of eternity,
He doth himself contrive, enact, behold.
