[8] Höffding, History of Modern Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 315.
It may set the scruples of some at rest to be reminded that Aquinas himself applied the term Natura Naturans to God as the cause of all existence. Eckhart and Bruno had made a similar application of it (cf. Martineau, Study of Spinoza, p. 226).
[9] Here we may note, by way of an anticipation, a truth that Kant afterwards was the first to grasp clearly: that it is only when the mechanism of phenomena is proved, that religion can be purged of materialism.
[10] Cf. letter to Arnauld, quoted by Höffding, I, p. 347: "The substantial unity presupposes a complete, indivisible being. Nothing of this kind is to be found in figure or motion ... but only in a soul or a substantial form similar to that which we call an 'I.'"
[11] The Monadology (quoted by Pattison, Idea of God, p. 180).
[12] Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 19.
[13] Cf. "With space the universe encloses me and engulfs me like an atom, but with thought I enclose the universe." A great saying.
[14] Novalis called him "the God-intoxicated": a bold phrase.
[15] We refer, of course, to the promulgation of the Bull Unigenitus, procured from Pope Clement XI by the Jesuits; when their opponents, the Jansenists "of all professions and classes, were subjected to imprisonment, confiscation, and every species of oppression" (Jervis, Student's History of France, p. 415).
The manœuvre is characterised by another historian as a "struggle of narrow-minded fanaticism, allied to absolutely unscrupulous political ambition, against all the learning and virtue which the French clergy still possessed" (Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Vol. II, p. 379).