Let us never tire of repeating, this is the mystery of man's mixed nature—an indication of a destiny in store for him superior to his actual condition. He carries within him the ideas of infinity, of perfection, and yet here below he is nothing but a finite being, imperfect, equally incapable of sufficing to himself and of satisfying himself, either in the domain of thought or of actual life. "There are more things in heaven and upon earth than philosophy—than even the philosophy 'of the absolute'—can explain. … To comprehend God, it needs to be God. A child might have said as much to Hegel." These words I borrow from M. Edmond Scherer's exposition of the doctrine of Hegel. [Footnote 65]
[Footnote 65: Melanges d'histoire religieuse, pp. 366, 341. 1864.]
Jesus in effect said, eighteen centuries ago: "I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes."
Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by receiving no being as God but man.
The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That truth is one—that is to say, that all truths, whatever their object, are in harmony with one another—the very word truth implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. They identified idea and reality, science and existence, confounding all things in order to reduce them to one single thing, and abolishing all beings in order to concentrate them all in one and the same being, which, after all, is nothing more than an impersonal notion and a barren name, falling in its turn into the void.
By what path did the Pantheists arrive at this abyss? What was the process employed by men of eminent powers of mind to construct a system so singularly factitious and hypothetical, and yet pretending, at the same time, to be so necessary and so rigorously philosophical?
Like some great men of antiquity, (and their number is considerable,) who sought to explain nature and the physical world by incomplete and precipitate hypotheses and systems, invented irrespectively of either facts or their laws, the Pantheists by similar means proceeded—nay, are proceeding—to explain man, the universe, and God; the Infinite and the finite. The method which for three centuries has constituted the glory of the natural sciences, and made their progress lasting, the exact study of facts and their relations; that method so long strange not only to general philosophy but to the special sciences themselves—I may at once call it by its proper name, the scientific method—was formerly, and remains still, strange to the Pantheists; to Spinoza as to Plotinus, to Hegel as to Spinoza. Whether Plotinus plunges into an ecstacy to arrive at and comprehend God in uniting man to God by the virtue of contemplation; or Spinoza, defining substance, makes it the principle from which to deduce his theory of the universe and of its unity; or Hegel, speaking of idea in order to arrive at the same result as Spinoza, seeks to obtain from his term substance—it is the same defect that appears in the labors of all these potent intelligences, not only in their development, but in the very point from which they start; for observation of facts and of their laws they substitute the affirmation and the definition of an axiom, and the deduction, logical, it is true, of its consequences. They disdain and set aside all study of the realities of the universe, believing themselves to be in possession of a key to open its secrets.