[CHAPTER XXI.]
RAPID GLANCES AT THE PRINCIPAL ARGUMENTS OF PANTHEISTS.
163. The principal arguments on which pantheism rests are founded on the unity of science, the universality of the idea of being, the absoluteness and exclusiveness of the idea of substance, and the absoluteness and exclusiveness of the conception of the infinite.
164. Science must be one, say the pantheists, and it cannot be completely so, unless there is unity of being. Science must be certain, and there cannot be absolute certainty, unless there is identity of the being which knows with the thing known.
The solution of these difficulties consists in denying the gratuitous propositions on which they are founded.
It is not true that human science must be one, nor that unity of being is necessary for the unity of science. They must prove both these assertions; to triumph in a discussion it is not enough to assert. Far from either of them being sufficiently proved, they are both contradicted by reason and by experience. It is unnecessary to repeat here, what I have explained at full length when treating of the possibility and existence of transcendental science as well in the absolute intellectual order as in the human. For this I refer the reader to the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of the first book.
The second proposition which exacts the identity of the subject knowing with the object known, has also been sufficiently refuted. I have elsewhere shown that the system of universal identity does not help to explain the problem of representation, and I have proved by incontestible arguments, that besides the representation of identity, there are the representations of causality and ideality.[69] I have also demonstrated the objective value of ideas, in so far as distinguished from objects, founding my proof on the unity of consciousness.[70]
The doctrines of Kant which convert the external world into a purely subjective fact, and thus give rise to Fichte's transcendental idealism, are refuted in the second book, where I have demonstrated the objectiveness of sensations,—in the third book, where I have proved the reality of extension, and in the seventh book, where I have proved that time is not a pure form of the internal sense.