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Pantheism is that method of thought which conceives of the universe as the development of one intelligent and voluntary, yet impersonal, substance, which reaches consciousness only in man. It therefore identifies God, not with each individual object in the universe, but with the totality of things. The current Pantheism of our day is idealistic.

The elements of truth in Pantheism are the intelligence and voluntariness of God, and his immanence in the universe; its error lies in denying God's personality and transcendence.

Pantheism denies the real existence of the finite, at the same time that it deprives the Infinite of self-consciousness and freedom. See Hunt, History of Pantheism; Manning, Half-truths and the Truth; Bayne, Christian Life, Social and Individual, 21–53; Hutton, on Popular Pantheism, in Essays, 1:55–76—“The pantheist's ‘I believe in God’, is a contradiction. He says: ‘I perceive the external as different from myself; but on further reflection, I perceive that this external was itself the percipient agency.’ So the worshiped is really the worshiper after all.” Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism, 173—“Man is a bottle of the ocean's water, in the ocean, temporarily distinguishable by its limitation within the bottle, but lost again in the ocean, so soon as these fragile limits are broken.” Martineau, Types, 1:23—Mere immanency excludes Theism; transcendency leaves it still possible; 211–225—Pantheism declares that “there is nothing but God; he is not only sole cause but entire effect; he is all in all.” Spinoza has been falsely called “the God-intoxicated man.” “Spinoza, on the contrary, translated God into the universe; it was Malebranche who transfigured the universe into God.”

The later Brahmanism is pantheistic. Rowland Williams, Christianity and Hinduism, quoted in Mozley on Miracles, 284—“In the final state personality vanishes. You will not, says the Brahman, accept the term ‘void’ as an adequate description of the mysterious nature of the soul, but you will clearly apprehend soul, in the final state, to be unseen and ungrasped being, thought, knowledge, joy—no other than very God.”Flint, Theism, 69—“Where the will is without energy, and rest is longed for as the end of existence, as among the Hindus, there is marked inability to think of God as cause or will, and constant inveterate tendency to pantheism.”

Hegel denies God's transcendence: “God is not a spirit beyond the stars; he is spirit in all spirit”; which means that God, the impersonal and unconscious Absolute, comes to consciousness only in man. If the eternal system of abstract thoughts were itself conscious, finite consciousness would disappear; hence the alternative is either no God, or no man. Stirling: “The Idea, so conceived, is a blind, dumb, invisible idol, and the theory is the most hopeless theory that has ever been presented to humanity.” It is practical autolatry, or self-deification. The world is reduced to a mere process of logic; thought thinks; there is thought without a thinker. To this doctrine of Hegel we may well oppose the remarks of Lotze: “We cannot make mind the equivalent of the infinitive to think—we feel that it must be that which thinks; the essence of things cannot be either existence or activity—it must be that which exists and that which acts. Thinking means nothing, if it is not the thinking of a thinker; acting and working mean nothing, if we leave out the conception of a subject distinguishable from them and from which they proceed.” To Hegel, Being is Thought; to Spinoza, Being has Thought + Extension; the truth seems to be that Being has Thought + Will, and may reveal itself in Extension and Evolution (Creation).

By other philosophers, however, Hegel is otherwise interpreted. Prof. H. Jones, in Mind, July, 1893: 289–306, claims that Hegel's fundamental Idea is not Thought, but Thinking: “The universe to him was not a system of thoughts, but a thinking reality, manifested most fully in man. … The fundamental reality is the universal intelligence whose operation we should seek to detect in all things. All reality is ultimately explicable as Spirit, or Intelligence—hence our ontology must be a Logic, and the laws of things must be laws of thinking.” Sterrett, in like manner, in his Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, 17, quotes Hegel's Logic, Wallace's translation, 89, 91, 236: “Spinoza's Substance is, as it were, a dark, shapeless abyss, which devours all definite content as utterly null, and produces from itself nothing that has positive subsistence in itself. … God is Substance—he is, however, no less the Absolute Person.” This is essential to religion, but this, says Hegel, Spinoza never perceived: “Everything depends upon the Absolute Truth being perceived, not merely as Substance, but as Subject.”God is self-conscious and self-determining Spirit. Necessity is excluded. Man is free and immortal. Men are not mechanical parts of God, nor do they lose their identity, although they find themselves truly only in him. With this estimate of Hegel's system, Caird, Erdmann and Mulford substantially agree. This is Tennyson's “Higher Pantheism.”

Seth, Ethical Principles, 440—“Hegel conceived the superiority of his system to Spinozism to lie in the substitution of Subject for Substance. The true Absolute must contain, instead of abolishing, relations; the true Monism must include, instead of excluding, Pluralism. A One which, like Spinoza's Substance, or the Hegelian Absolute, does not enable us to think the Many, cannot be the true One—the unity of the Manifold. … Since evil exists, Schopenhauer substituted for Hegel's Panlogism, which asserted the identity of the rational and the real, a blind impulse of life—for absolute Reason he substituted a reasonless Will”—a system of practical pessimism. Alexander, Theories of Will, 5—“Spinoza recognized no distinction between will and intellectual affirmation or denial.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:107—“As there is no reason in the conception of pure space why any figures or forms, lines, surfaces, solids, should arise in it, so there is no reason in the pure colorless abstraction of Infinite Substance why any world of finite things and beings should ever come into existence. It is the grave of all things, the productive source of nothing.” Hegel called Schelling's Identity or Absolute “the infinite night in which all cows are black”—an allusion to Goethe's Faust, part 2, act 1, where the words are added: “and cats are gray.”Although Hegel's preference of the term Subject, instead of the term Substance, has led many to maintain that he believed in a personality of God distinct from that of man, his over-emphasis of the Idea, and his comparative ignoring of the elements of Love and Will, leave it still doubtful whether his Idea was anything more than unconscious and impersonal intelligence—less materialistic than that of Spinoza indeed, yet open to many of the same objections.

We object to this system as follows:

1. Its idea of God is self-contradictory, since it makes him infinite, yet consisting only of the finite; absolute, yet existing in necessary relation to the universe; supreme, yet shut up to a process of self-evolution and dependent for self-consciousness on man; without self-determination, yet the cause of all that is.

Saisset, Pantheism, 148—“An imperfect God, yet perfection arising from imperfection.”Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:13—“Pantheism applies to God a principle of growth and imperfection, which belongs only to the finite.” Calderwood, Moral Philos., 245—“Its first requisite is moment, or movement, which it assumes, but does not account for.” Caro's sarcasm applies here: “Your God is not yet made—he is in process of manufacture.” See H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 25. Pantheism is practical atheism, for impersonal spirit is only blind and necessary force. Angelus Silesius: “Wir beten ‘Es gescheh, mein Herr und Gott, dein Wille’; Und sieh', Er hat nicht Will'—Er ist ein ew'ge Stille”—which Max Müller translates as follows: “We pray, ‘O Lord our God, Do thou thy holy Will’; and see! God has no will; He is at peace and still.”Angelus Silesius consistently makes God dependent for self-consciousness on man: “I know that God cannot live An instant without me; He must give up the ghost, If I should cease to be.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Hegelianism destroys both God and man. It reduces man to an object of the universal Thinker, and leaves this universal Thinker without any true personality.” Pantheism is a game of solitaire, in which God plays both sides.

2. Its assumed unity of substance is not only without proof, but it directly contradicts our intuitive judgments. These testify that we are not parts and particles of God, but distinct personal subsistences.

Martineau, Essays, 1:158—“Even for immanency, there must be something wherein to dwell, and for life, something whereon to act.” Many systems of monism contradict consciousness; they confound harmony between two with absorption in one. “In Scripture we never find the universe called τὸ πᾶν, for this suggests the idea of a self-contained unity: we have everywhere τὰ πάντα instead.” The Bible recognizes the element of truth in pantheism—God is “through all”; also the element of truth in mysticism—God is “in you all”; but it adds the element of transcendence which both these fail to recognize—God is “above all” (Eph. 4:6). See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Orig. of Christianity, 539. G. D. B. Pepper: “He who is over all and in all is yet distinct from all. If one is over a thing, he is not that very thing which he is over. If one is in something, he must be distinct from that something. And so the universe, over which and in which God is, must be thought of as something distinct from God. The creation cannot be identical with God, or a mere form of God.” We add, however, that it may be a manifestation of God and dependent upon God, as our thoughts and acts are manifestations of our mind and will and dependent upon our mind and will, yet are not themselves our mind and will.

Pope wrote: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is and God the soul.” But Case, Physical Realism, 193, replies: “Not so. Nature is to God as works are to a man; and as man's works are not his body, so neither is nature the body of God.” Matthew Arnold, On Heine's Grave: “What are we all but a mood, A single mood of the life Of the Being in whom we exist, Who alone is all things in one?” Hovey, Studies, 51—“Scripture recognizes the element of truth in pantheism, but it also teaches the existence of a world of things, animate and inanimate, in distinction from God. It represents men as prone to worship the creature more than the Creator. It describes them as sinners worthy of death … moral agents. … It no more thinks of men as being literally parts of God, than it thinks of children as being parts of their parents, or subjects as being parts of their king.” A. J. F. Behrends: “The true doctrine lies between the two extremes of a crass dualism which makes God and the world two self-contained entities, and a substantial monism in which the universe has only a phenomenal existence. There is no identity of substance nor division of the divine substance. The universe is eternally dependent, the product of the divine Word, not simply manufactured. Creation is primarily a spiritual act.” Prof. George M. Forbes: “Matter exists in subordinate dependence upon God; spirit in coördinate dependence upon God. The body of Christ was Christ externalized, made manifest to sense-perception. In apprehending matter, I am apprehending the mind and will of God. This is the highest sort of reality. Neither matter nor finite spirits, then, are mere phenomena.”

3. It assigns no sufficient cause for that fact of the universe which is highest in rank, and therefore most needs explanation, namely, the existence of personal intelligences. A substance which is itself unconscious, and under the law of necessity, cannot produce beings who are self-conscious and free.

Gess, Foundations of our Faith, 36—“Animal instinct, and the spirit of a nation working out its language, might furnish analogies, if they produced personalities as their result, but not otherwise. Nor were these tendencies self-originated, but received from an external source.” McCosh, Intuitions, 215, 393, and Christianity and Positivism, 180. Seth, Freedom as an Ethical Postulate, 47—“If man is an ‘imperium in imperio,’ not a person, but only an aspect or expression of the universe or God, then he cannot be free. Man may be depersonalized either into nature or into God. Through the conception of our own personality we reach that of God. To resolve our personality into that of God would be to negate the divine greatness itself by invalidating the conception through which it was reached.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 551, is more ambiguous: “The positive relation of every appearance as an adjective to Reality; and the presence of Reality among its appearances in different degrees and with diverse values; this double truth we have found to be the centre of philosophy.” He protests against both “an empty transcendence” and “a shallow pantheism.” Hegelian immanence and knowledge, he asserts, identified God and man. But God is more than man or man's thought. He is spirit and life—best understood from the human self, with its thoughts, feelings, volitions. Immanence needs to be qualified by transcendence. “God is not God till he has become all-in-all, and a God which is all-in-all is not the God of religion. God is an aspect, and that must mean but an appearance of the Absolute.”Bradley's Absolute, therefore, is not so much personal as super-personal; to which we reply with Jackson, James Martineau, 416—“Higher than personality is lower; beyond it is regression from its height. From the equator we may travel northward, gaining ever higher and higher latitudes; but, if ever the pole is reached, pressing on from thence will be descending into lower latitudes, not gaining higher. … Do I say, I am a pantheist? Then, ipso facto, I deny pantheism; for, in the very assertion of the Ego, I imply all else as objective to me.”

4. It therefore contradicts the affirmations of our moral and religious natures by denying man's freedom and responsibility; by making God to include in himself all evil as well as all good; and by precluding all prayer, worship, and hope of immortality.

Conscience is the eternal witness against pantheism. Conscience witnesses to our freedom and responsibility, and declares that moral distinctions are not illusory. Renouf, Hibbert Lect., 234—“It is only out of condescension to popular language that pantheistic systems can recognize the notions of right and wrong, of iniquity and sin. If everything really emanates from God, there can be no such thing as sin. And the ablest philosophers who have been led to pantheistic views have vainly endeavored to harmonize these views with what we understand by the notion of sin or moral evil. The great systematic work of Spinoza is entitled 'Ethica'; but for real ethics we might as profitably consult the Elements of Euclid.” Hodge, System. Theology, 1:299–330—“Pantheism is fatalistic. On this theory, duty = pleasure; right = might; sin = good in the making. Satan, as well as Gabriel, is a self-development of God. The practical effects of pantheism upon popular morals and life, wherever it has prevailed, as in Buddhist India and China, demonstrate its falsehood.” See also Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 118; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 202; Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:603–615; Dix, Pantheism, Introd., 12. On the fact of sin as refuting the pantheistic theory, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernat., 140–164.

Wordsworth: “Look up to heaven! the industrious sun Already half his course hath run; He cannot halt or go astray; But our immortal spirits may.” President John H. Harris; “You never ask a cyclone's opinion of the ten commandments.” Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 245—“Pantheism makes man an automaton. But how can an automaton have duties?” Principles of Ethics, 18—“Ethics is defined as the science of conduct, and the conventions of language are relied upon to cover up the fact that there is no ‘conduct’ in the case. If man be a proper automaton, we might as well speak of the conduct of the winds as of human conduct; and a treatise on planetary motions is as truly the ethics of the solar system as a treatise on human movements is the ethics of man.” For lack of a clear recognition of personality, either human or divine, Hegel's Ethics is devoid of all spiritual nourishment—his “Rechtsphilosophie”has been called “a repast of bran.” Yet Professor Jones, in Mind, July, 1893:304, tells us that Hegel's task was “to discover what conception of the single principle or fundamental unity which alone is, is adequate to the differences which it carries within it. ‘Being,’ he found, leaves no room for differences—it is overpowered by them. … He found that the Reality can exist only as absolute Self-consciousness, as a Spirit, who is universal, and who knows himself in all things. In all this he is dealing, not simply with thoughts, but with Reality.” Prof. Jones's vindication of Hegel, however, still leaves it undecided whether that philosopher regarded the divine self-consciousness as distinct from that of finite beings, or as simply inclusive of theirs. See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:109.

5. Our intuitive conviction of the existence of a God of absolute perfection compels us to conceive of God as possessed of every highest quality and attribute of men, and therefore, especially, of that which constitutes the chief dignity of the human spirit, its personality.

Diman, Theistic Argument, 328—“We have no right to represent the supreme Cause as inferior to ourselves, yet we do this when we describe it under phrases derived from physical causation.” Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 351—“We cannot conceive of anything as impersonal, yet of higher nature than our own—any being that has not knowledge and will must be indefinitely inferior to one who has them.” Lotze holds truly, not that God is supra-personal, but that man is infra-personal, seeing that in the infinite Being alone is self-subsistence, and therefore perfect personality. Knight, Essays in Philosophy, 224—“The radical feature of personality is the survival of a permanent self, under all the fleeting or deciduous phases of experience; in other words, the personal identity that is involved in the assertion ‘I am.’… Is limitation a necessary adjunct of that notion?” Seth, Hegelianism: “As in us there is more for ourselves than for others, so in God there is more of thought for himself than he manifests to us. Hegel's doctrine is that of immanence without transcendence.” Heinrich Heine was a pupil and intimate friend of Hegel. He says: “I was young and proud, and it pleased my vain-glory when I learned from Hegel that the true God was not, as my grandmother believed, the God who lived in heaven, but was rather myself upon the earth.” John Fiske, Idea of God, xvi—“Since our notion of force is purely a generalization from our subjective sensations of overcoming resistance, there is scarcely less anthropomorphism in the phrase ‘Infinite Power’ than in the phrase ‘Infinite Person.’ We must symbolize Deity in some form that has meaning to us; we cannot symbolize it as physical; we are bound to symbolize it as psychical. Hence we may say, God is Spirit. This implies God's personality.”

6. Its objection to the divine personality, that over against the Infinite there can be in eternity past no non-ego to call forth self-consciousness, is refuted by considering that even man's cognition of the non-ego logically presupposes knowledge of the ego, from which the non-ego is distinguished; that, in an absolute mind, self-consciousness cannot be conditioned, as in the case of finite mind, upon contact with a not-self; and that, if the distinguishing of self from a not-self were an essential condition of divine self-consciousness, the eternal personal distinctions in the divine nature or the eternal states of the divine mind might furnish such a condition.

Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:163, 190 sq.—“Personal self-consciousness is not primarily a distinguishing of the ego from the non-ego, but rather a distinguishing of itself from itself, i.e., of the unity of the self from the plurality of its contents. … Before the soul distinguishes self from the not-self, it must know self—else it could not see the distinction. Its development is connected with the knowledge of the non-ego, but this is due, not to the fact of personality, but to the fact of finite personality. The mature man can live for a long time upon his own resources. God needs no other, to stir him up to mental activity. Finiteness is a hindrance to the development of our personality. Infiniteness is necessary to the highest personality.” Lotze, Microcosmos, vol. 3, chapter 4; transl. in N. Eng., March, 1881:191–200—“Finite spirit, not having conditions of existence in itself, can know the ego only upon occasion of knowing the non-ego. The Infinite is not so limited. He alone has an independent existence, neither introduced nor developed through anything not himself, but, in an inward activity without beginning or end, maintains himself in himself.” See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 55–69; H. N. Gardiner on Lotze, in Presb. Rev., 1885:669–673; Webb, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 2:49–61.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Absolute Personality = perfect consciousness of self, and perfect power over self. We need something external to waken our consciousness—yet self-consciousness comes [logically] before consciousness of the world. It is the soul's act. Only after it has distinguished self from self, can it consciously distinguish self from another.” British Quarterly, Jan. 1874:32, note; July, 1884:108—“The ego is thinkable only in relation to the non-ego; but the ego is liveable long before any such relation.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:185, 186—In the pantheistic scheme, “God distinguishes himself from the world, and thereby finds the object required by the subject; … in the Christian scheme, God distinguishes himself from himself, not from something that is not himself.” See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:122–126; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christ. Belief, 161–190; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit; Eichhorn, Die Persönlichkeit Gottes; Seth, Hegelianism and Personality; Knight, on Personality and the Infinite, in Studies in Philos. and Lit., 70–118.

On the whole subject of Pantheism, see Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:141–194, esp. 192—“The personality of God consists in his voluntary agency as free cause in an unpledged sphere, that is, a sphere transcending that of immanent law. But precisely this also it is that constitutes his infinity, extending his sway, after it has filled the actual, over all the possible, and giving command over indefinite alternatives. Though you might deny his infinity without prejudice to his personality, you cannot deny his personality without sacrificing his infinitude: for there is a mode of action—the preferential, the very mode which distinguishes rational beings—from which you exclude him”; 341—“The metaphysicians who, in their impatience of distinction, insist on taking the sea on board the boat, swamp not only it but the thought it holds, and leave an infinitude which, as it can look into no eye and whisper into no ear, they contradict in the very act of affirming.” Jean Paul Richter's “Dream”: “I wandered to the farthest verge of Creation, and there I saw a Socket, where an Eye should have been, and I heard the shriek of a Fatherless World” (quoted in David Brown's Memoir of John Duncan, 49–70). Shelley, Beatrice Cenci: “Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No God, no Heaven, no Earth, in the void world—The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!”

For the opposite view, see Biedermann, Dogmatik, 638–647—“Only man, as finite spirit, is personal; God, as absolute spirit, is not personal. Yet in religion the mutual relations of intercourse and communion are always personal. … Personality is the only adequate term by which we can represent the theistic conception of God.” Bruce, Providential Order, 76—“Schopenhauer does not level up cosmic force to the human, but levels down human will-force to the cosmic. Spinoza held intellect in God to be no more like man's than the dog-star is like a dog. Hartmann added intellect to Schopenhauer's will, but the intellect is unconscious and knows no moral distinctions.” See also Bruce, Apologetics, 71–90; Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 128–134, 171–186; J. M. Whiton, Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:306—Pantheism = God consists in all things; Theism = All things consist in God, their ground, not their sum. Spirit in man shows that the infinite Spirit must be personal and transcendent Mind and Will.