PIETY AND MORALITY OF PANTHEISM. IF the Bhagavadgitâ is pantheistic, it is none the less theistic also. While these two terms in The demand their extreme meaning represent widely differ- of the age. ent conceptions, here is a higher unity which seeks to include what is best in both. Whatever may have been the result of this effort, its comprehensiveness deserves special notice, in view of the demand of our civilization for a breadth and freedom which can appreciate every real element of human belief. In this spirit of the age, Goethe wrote to Jacobi that he could not be content with one way of thinking; that as artist and poet he was a polytheist, while as student of nature he was a pantheist. All phases of religion appear alike imperfect, if defined as mutually exclusive systems. But their real affinities are coming to be comprehended in the unity of personal experience. We are learning to recognize theism, polytheism, and pantheism as legitimate parts of ourselves, to resume them under aspects which explain their power over races and times other than our own, and so to relieve the steps of human endeavor from disparagement by exclusive creeds. Justice to There are phases of skepticism and phases of science which seem to turn from religion as pantheism well as intuition with sweeping denial. There needed. are phases of superstition apparently blind to all rights of skepticism and science. But both science and religion in our day are to receive a republican breadth of meaning. They will not only guard the right of every faculty and every aspiration to plead its own cause, but respect the witness it may be able to bring in its own behalf from the confidence of mankind. To how purely negative a criticism has pantheism been subjected! Yet there must be truth in a form of belief which has satisfied enduring civilizations, and which has reappeared in philosophy and ethics wherever these have reached a high development, without regard to the lines which separate recognized religions or even races. It has usually been through some form of spiritual pantheism that these distinctive religions have escaped their limitations, and risen into a universality unknown either to their founders or to the ordinary current of their history. We may instance the Sufism of the Mohammedans, the NeoPlatonism of the Greeks, and the Mysticism that preceded the Reformation in Germany and Italy, and showed a far larger and profounder spirit than that movement. Modern philosophy has received its strongest impulse from a similar tendency in German thought. And the unities of political, intellectual, and religious life, at the present time, make the relation of pantheism to the coming age a question of real moment. Whatever inferior forms of experience may have received or assumed the name, it is of great impor tance to emphasize that special purport of pantheism which accounts for its frequent recurrence and its noble fruits. Our study of the Hindu schools of religious philosophy should help us to this result. It is commonly insisted that all pantheistic systems are ways of confounding the Creator with the What is creation, and sinking the soul in the senses. Pantheism? This form of statement comes mainly from Semitic habits of thought inherited by Christianity. Pantheism could expect no other reception from their intense jealousy for the rights of an external deity, by whom the world is made out of nothing, and the human soul autocratically ruled. But, if pantheism were what this fixed impression of the Christian Church as a whole represents it, it would certainly be far from resembling the aspirations of those Hindu seers whom we have been studying in the preceding chapters of this volume. They, of all men, sought emancipation from the "wheel of the senses," and fervently believed in the possibility of union with the Absolute and Eternal. In reality, pantheism, whether as sentiment or philosophy, is not the worship of a finite and visible world. In its nobler forms it is essentially of the spirit, and rests, as its name imports, on these principles that Being is, in its substance, one; that this substantial unity is, and must be, implicated in all energy, though indefinably and inconceivably, — as Life, all-pervading, all-containing, the constant ground and ultimate force of all that is; and that the recognition of this inseparableness of the known universe from God is consistent with the worship of God as infinitely transcending it. A theism of pure sentiment, following the Hebrew Limits of theism. prophetic consciousness of intimacy with God, yet, like that earlier Semitism, too monarchical in its Christian theory to recognize how completely all manifestation must be one with its spiritual substance, was the religious inspiration of Jesus and his companions. Not less was this the limit for every form under which Christianity could appear. Even the Gospel of John-though a later product, drawing largely from Greek and Oriental fountains, and imbued with mystical elements apparently unknown to the original faith as it was in Jesus-stopped short, on this track, with limiting the pure immanence of God in the universe to the ideally constructed person of Jesus, as the "Word made flesh." All pantheistic forms or tendencies of distinctive Christianity have had the same limitation, and this obscures the universal element, which nevertheless underlay and in fact prompted them. Modern unity. The ideal demand of modern life is for fuller recognition than was ever before possible, that spiritideal of ual being is of one substance. All religions measurably express this truth, and their aspirations after universality imply it. But their distinctive tendencies have interfered more or less harmfully with its free development and just emphasis. With the knowledge of universal laws there enters a more genial and inclusive spirit. Philosophy now aims at complete expression of the essential unity of subject with object, in what Aristotle called "thought thinking itself;" thus reaching the ultimate conception of One Spiritual Substance embracing all being within the scope of its self-affirmation. The Imagination of our time divines, beyond 1 This is involved even in the "relativity of all knowledge," which might seem to make it void; since the conception of this relativity implies recognition of its opposite, the non-relative or absolute, as the test of its own reality even as a conception. this metaphysical conception, that the living universe is the play of deity, through all forms and forces, all dream and faith and action, all names, all symbols, all religions. Its Piety and its Humanity must be more than a mere recognition of what is eternally good and true, as an object of thought: they aim at the expression of this, as far as possible, in forms of which it shall be at once the productive cause and the inseparable life. Its Sciences must recognize that what lies beyond their tests and explanations is really the one master force involved in every step of evolution from lowest to highest forms, the substance of these force-factors out of which all constructions flow. Its God must be no mere Creator of a distinct universe, in the sense of maker, constructor, provider; but far more, even the inmost Essence and Principle of all. The age, in fine, is resuming, in the fulness of its experience, the ideal meaning of all spiritual motives profound enough to have acquired distinctive names, and to have entered into the classification of religious systems. I am not then forgetting the larger light of science and practical relation in the civilization of the West, when I bring the "Hindu dreamers" to help towards a better understanding of the needs of our time. It is these very forms of intellectual maturity that impel us to seek fresh meaning in all ancient divinations of the Unity of Being. The mystery The mystery which we are to ourselves, and find in all things around us, not only transcends our theological terms, but effaces all scientific land- of being. marks and distinctions. It is by thought we know all that we call God, the world, ourselves; and in all |