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 [pg 101] 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: [pg 102] “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.