Bradley shrugged his shoulders. His mood of mind at that moment was the very reverse of conciliatory towards any form of transcendentalism, and this seemed arrant nonsense.
‘Let me tell you frankly,’ he said, ‘that in all such matters as these I am a pure materialist.’
‘Exactly,’ cried the Professor. ‘So are we, sir.’
‘Materialists?’
‘Why, certainly. Spiritualism is materialism; in other words, everything is spirit matter. All bodies, as the great Swedenborg demonstrated long ago, are spirit; thought is spirit—that is to say, sir, sunlight. The same great principle of which I have spoken is the destruction of all religion save the religion of solar science. It demolishes Theism, which has been the will-o’-the-wisp of the world, abolishes Christianity, which has been its bane. The God of the universe is solar Force, which is universal and pantheistic.’
‘Pray sit down,’ said Bradley, now for the first time becoming interested. ‘If I understand you, there is no personal God?’
‘Of course not,’ returned the little man, sidling into a chair and dropping his eyeglass. ‘A personal God is, as the scientists call it, merely an anthropomorphic Boom. As the great cosmic Bard of solar biology expresses it in his sublime epic:
The radiant flux and reflux, the serene
Atomic ebb and flow of force divine,
This, this alone, is God, the Demiurgus;