Man is made for truth. The ray of intelligence beaming from his countenance and kindling his looks with life marks his superiority over all inferior creation, and loudly proclaims this fact. Intelligence must have an object; and what can this object be but truth? As a necessary consequence from this fact, it follows that error can be nothing else than fragments of truth; ill-assorted, improperly joined together. Error does not consist in what logicians call simple ideas, or self-evident propositions; but in complex ideas, the result of a long chain of syllogisms. Another consequence, closely allied to the first, is, that the greater the error, the more universal and more widely spread, the more particular truths it must contain. Or, if it does not contain a greater number of partial truths, it must have the power of apparently satisfying a real and prevalent tendency of our mind, otherwise it would never exert dominion over the intelligence; or else it must possess the secret of awakening and alluring a true and imperative aspiration of our nature.
It is through these views that we have been enabled to explain to ourselves the prevalence of Pantheism. The simple utterance of the word Pantheism, the Deity of everything, would seem to carry its refutation with it, so plain and evident is its falsehood, so glaring its absurdity.
Pantheism, however, has been the universal error in time and space. In India, Persia, China, Greece, Rome, Pantheism flourished; now under a religious, and then under a philosophical form. After the Christian era it was the religion or system of those who did not understand the Christian dogmas as taught by the church; and the fathers of the first centuries, in battling against Gnosticism, Eclecticism, and Neoplatonism, were struggling with this old error of the world—Pantheism. Depressed for awhile by the efforts of the doctors of the church, it arose with fiercer energy under the forms of all those heresies which attacked the dogma of the Incarnation of the Word.
In the middle ages there were many philosophers who held Pantheism; and in modern times, since the dawn of the Reformation, it has become the prevalent, the absorbing error of the world. Always the same as to substance, it assumes every variety of form: now you see it in a logical dress, as in the doctrine of the German school; again it takes a psychological garb, as in that of the French school with Cousin at its head; or it assumes a social and political form, as in the Pantheism of Fourier, Leroux, Saint Simon, and all the progressists of every color or shade; and finally, it puts on a ghostly shroud, as taught by the American spiritualists. Under whatever garb it may appear, it penetrates and fills all, and pretends to explain all. It penetrates philosophy, natural science, history, literature, the fine arts, the family, society and the body politic, and religion. It holds its sway over all, and exhibits itself as having the secret of good and evil. How is this to be explained? If the falsehood of Pantheism be so evident, whence is it that it is the universal error in time and space, and has made such ravages in man's intelligence? The greater its falsehood, the more inexplicable becomes its prevalence. Has the nature of man changed? Has his intelligence lost its object? It is true, man's intelligence is not perfect. Since the fall it is weakened and obscured, but doubtless it has not ceased and could not cease to be intelligence; truth has not ceased to be its natural essential object. How, then, are we to explain the prevalence of so mighty an error?
By the fact that it is a system which by its generality seems to satisfy a supreme tendency of our mind, and to appease one of the most imperative cravings of our souls. Man's intelligence has a natural tendency to synthesize, that is, to bring everything into unity. This tendency arises both from the essential oneness of the mind and from the nature of its object. The object of the mind is being or reality in some form or other. That which does exist cannot even be apprehended, and hence cannot be the object of the mind. To understand and to understand nothing is, at the same time, the affirmation and the negation of the understanding. Now, if the object of the intelligence, in order to be known and understood by the said faculty, must represent itself under the form of being or reality, it is under this respect necessarily one. Under whatever form it may exhibit itself, under whatever quality it may be concealed, it must always be reality or being, and, as such, one. But if being, reality, or unity, taken in the abstract, was the sole object of the intelligence, there would be an end to all its movement or life. All science would be at an end, because science is a process, a movement; and movement is not possible where an abstraction is the sole object of the mind. Being and unity, then, abstractly considered, would be the eternal stupor of the mind. This cannot be so, however. Intelligence is action, life, movement. Now, all this implies multiplicity; hence the object of the intelligence must also be multiple. But does not this second condition also destroy the former, which requires that the object of the intelligence should be one? Here reason finds a necessary, though, as we shall see, only an apparent contradiction, both in the logical as well as ontological order. In the logical order, because the intelligence seems to require unity and multiplicity as the conditions without which its action becomes impossible. In the ontological order, or the order of reality, because if the object is not at the same time one and multiple, how can those conditions of the mind be satisfied?
The intelligence, then, in order to live, must be able to travel from unity to multiplicity in an ascending or descending process, and to do so, not arbitrarily, but for reasons resting on reality.
In this lies the life of the intelligence; science is nothing but this synthetical and analytical movement. Let the mind stop at analysis or multiplicity, and you will give it an agglomeration of facts of which it can neither see the reason nor the link which connects them: and hence you place it in unnatural bonds, which, sooner or later, it will break, it matters not whether by a sophistical or a dialectic process. On the other hand, let it stop at unity, and you condemn it to stupor and death.
The foregoing ideas will explain the fact how a particular error will either have a very short existence or fall into the universal error of Pantheism. For in this, so far as we can see, lies the reason of the universal dominion of Pantheism. Because it proposes to explain the whole question of human knowledge, it takes it up in all its universality, and the solution which it sets forth has all the appearance of satisfying the most imperative tendency of our mind. To be enabled to explain the numberless multiplicity of realities, no matter how, and, at the same time, to bring them into a compact and perfect whole, strikes to the quick the very essence of man's intelligence and allures it with its charms. If this be not the main reason of the prevalence of Pantheism, we acknowledge we do not understand how such a mighty error could ever take possession of man's mind; we are tempted to say that human understanding was made for falsehood, which is to deny the very notion of intelligence.
What Pantheism proposes to do for the mind it also promises to accomplish for the soul.