Spirit of Nature! here!
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers
Here is thy flitting temple.
Yet not the slightest leaf
That quivers to the breeze
Is less instinct with thee;
Yet not the meanest worm
That lurks in graves and fattens on the dead
Less shares thy eternal breath.[138]
With Spinoza, Drummond maintains that two substances having different attributes can have nothing in common between them; and that there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature. Infinite, immaterial, eternal, substance has nothing in common with substance which is material, finite, and perishable. How is it possible, then, that the former produced the latter? “An immaterial substance is necessarily without extension, or solidity, and never could have bestowed what it never possessed. God is infinite and consequently his substance is the sole, universal and eternal substance. Of this eternal substance there are two modifications—mind and extension. Human mind is part of the infinite mind of God. By body is meant the mode which expresses the essence of God, inasmuch as it is contemplated as extended substance, in a certain limited way, consequently though we do not call the Deity corporeal, as that would express what is finite, yet we say that all extended substance is contained in God, since extension and mind are the eternal attributes of his essence.”[139]
Matter moves and acts according to its own laws; it preserves what we term the fair order of the universe, and it guides the motions of those worlds that are constituted out of it, by the properties which are inherent in it. “Why then should we not say that it feels, thinks and reasons in man. Thoughts and sentiments proceed from peculiar distributions of atoms in the human brain.” The same necessity which gives us a peculiar form and constitution also gives us a peculiar disposition and character. From these observations we may conclude with certainty that all bodies are capable of being affected by attraction and repulsion, of making combinations, of suffering dissolution, and that they always strive to persevere in that state in which they are while it is suitable to them.”[140]
Shelley has the same thought:
Throughout this varied and eternal world
Soul is the only element; the block
That for uncounted ages has remained
The moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight
Is active living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part
And the minutest atom comprehends
A world of loves and hatreds.[141]
Again in a letter to Miss Hitchener, November 24, 1811: “Yet that flower has a soul; for what is soul but that which makes an organized being to be what it is?... I will say then that all nature is animated; that microscopic vision, as it has discovered to us millions of animated beings, so might it, if extended, find that nature itself was but a mass of organized animation.”
Southey told Shelley that he was a pantheist and not an atheist. He (Southey) says: “I ought not to call myself an atheist, since in reality I believe that the universe is God.” “Pantheism in its narrower and proper philosophic sense is any system which expressly (not merely by implication) regards the finite world as simply a mode, limitation, part or aspect of the one eternal being; and of such a nature, that from the standpoint of this Being no distinct existence can be attributed to it.”[142] In so far as Shelley gives to nature the attributes of God he is a pantheist. This he often does. Thus, in Julian and Maddalo, “sacred nature”; in The Revolt of Islam, V, II, “dread nature”; and in the Refutation of Deism he speaks of “divine nature.” Often though he distinguishes between God and Nature; and in this respect differs from Spinoza and those who are pantheists in the stricter use of the term. Thus in The Revolt of Islam, IX, 14, “by God and nature and necessity.”
There is another difference between the pantheism of Shelley and that of Spinoza. Shelley does not make any difference between men, animals and plants. They are all about on the same level. Spinoza on the other hand makes man the king and center of the Universe.
Shelley may have gotten his pantheistic views from Volney and Holbach as well as from Drummond. In the Systeme de la Nature, II, c. VI, we read: “Tout nous pronne donc que ce n’est pas hors de la nature que nous devons chercher la Divinite. Quand nous voudrons en avoir une idée, disons que la nature est Dieu.”
A characteristic of his later pantheism is that it identifies God with love. “Great Spirit, deepest love! Which rulest and dost move all things which live and are.”[143] Again, “O Power!... thou which interpenetratest all things and without which this glorious world were a blind and formless chaos. Love, author of good, God, King, Father.”[144]