For no Pantheist has ever held that everything is God, any more than a teacher of physiology, in enforcing on his students the unity of the human organism, would insist that every toe and finger is the man.
And if this should seem unsatisfying, let it be remembered that to this devout Pantheist the divine attributes and their modes were the expression of the very substance and life of God.
But that very approval of Lucretius forbids us to regard the older poet as a Pantheist in our sense of the term.
Indeed, their favourite comparison of creature life to the ray of a candle is not really a Pantheistic conception; because to the true Pantheist the creature is not an emanation external to God, but a finite mode of infinite Being.
And if the Pantheist in these days be asked, "What interpretation then do you propose?
Channing's word, that "perhaps matter is but a mode of thought," the most earnest Pantheist would hardly desire more.
For it is to be remembered that Spinoza was the first Pantheist who was also a prophet, in the sense of speaking out the divine voice of the infinite Universe to its human constituent parts.
But that Dorner was no pantheist appears from the following quotations from his Hist.
So the pantheistis generally an ascetic cut off from the world to be consistent in his pantheism.
As already said--to the pantheist the word sin has no meaning.
The Pantheist must declare, and does declare in his doctrine of Maya or Delusion, that the soul and matter are illusions.
One may notice how to the Pantheist the Catholic's worship is a worship of sin, even as his own is to the Catholic.
The real difference is perhaps this; God appears to a Theist as the root, to a Pantheist as the flower of things.
It was so with Seneca, a pantheistthrough and through.
Theist andpantheist at once, his mind was a ferment of different systems of thought.
I believed myself to be a very good Christian in those days; but I was really as unaffected and sincere a Poly-Pantheist or Old Nature heathen as ever lived in Etrusco-Roman or early German days.
He is a pantheist in so far as he defines God as the sum total of all sensible and ideal existence.
To assume design at all is to assume precisely what one is most bound to prove; and to assume design in the universe is to assume what cannot be proved, yea, what the theist requires to show against the pantheist cannot be proved.
The pantheist errs not so much in what he affirms of it, as in what he denies to it.
Granting that the universe, so far as its phenomena are concerned, has had a cause, it is impossible to show that any other cause is required than a cause within itself, such as the pantheist supposes.
The Pantheist identifies God with the world: the Manichee attributes to the world an absolute existence, independent of God.
With the Pantheist sin ceases to have any existence: for it is only one form of God’s working.
A certain inward sentiment, emotion, or affection, which even a pantheist or an atheist may experience, suffices.
The second supposition he rejects as the pantheistic hypothesis, which is a mistake, for no pantheist or anybody else asserts that the universe creates itself.
The pantheist denies that it is created at all; and the philosopher denies that it creates itself; for, since to create is to act, self-creation would require the universe to act before it existed.
The atheist calls the reality asserted cosmos or nature, and the pantheist calls it God, but both assert one and the same thing.
The Pantheist says, "I believe in a God;" but this saying is only a distinction without a difference.
The animist and pantheist represent different stages but not different methods of thought.
Towards the Jehovah and the ethic of the Old Testament he holds, however, the attitude rather of an ancient Gnostic than of a modern rationalist; and in his philosophy he is either a very "godly" deist or a pantheist miscarried.
To take this for granted in reasoning with a pantheist or atheist is simply to assume the point at issue.
It is perfectly true, that a legitimate body of reasoning may be constructed, if thepantheist or the atheist agrees to assume that a God exists for the purpose of supplying a basis for the argument.
That he was essentially a pantheist is now recognized by a number of writers.
The firmest pantheist questioned not the advisability of propitiating the sun-god, however much he might regard this god as but a part of one that was greater.
To the true pantheist all is equally divine, and everything for the best or for the worst, it does not much matter which.
Footnote 244: I mean that a pantheistmay with equal consistency call himself an optimist or a pessimist, or both alternately.
The pantheist is not troubled with the difficulty of reconciling the philosophy of the absolute with belief in a personal God; for belief in a personal God is no part of his creed.
