IMMANENCE
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IMMANENCE
world". Human souls are but sparks from it, or
rather its phenomena, which vanish at death and are
re-absorbed into the bosom of nature. This is Hy-
lozoism carried to its ultimate expression.
The Greek and Roman Stoics changed nothing in this conception. Philo alone, before Christianity, at^ tempted to transform it. Pursuing the syncretic method which he brought into repute in the School of Alexandria, he undertook to harmonize Moses, Plato, and Zeno. Thus he was led into a sort of inverted Stoicism, setting up at the origin of all things no longer a corporeal seminal principle, but a spiritual pod, per- fect, anterior to matter, from whom everything is de- rived by a process of outflow and downflow continued without limit. Proclus, Porphyry, Jamblicus, and Plotinus adopted this emanationist Pantheism, which formed the basis of their neo-Platonism. From Egypt the Alexandrian ideas spread over the West through two channels. First, in the fourth century, they entered Spain with a certain Mark, who had lived at Memphis; in Spain they developed by amalgamat- ing with Manichajism under the influence of Priscil- lian, and after the German conquest of Spain they passed into Gaul. In the latter country, moreover, they were propagated by the Latin translations of Boethius. Later on, we find traces of them in Scotus Eriugena (ninth century), then in Abelard (twelfth century), Amaury of Bene, and David of Dinant (twelfth and thirteenth centuries), and especially in the celebrated Meister Eckhart (fourteenth century). Soon after this the Renaissance restores the ancient doctrines to honourable consideration, and the philos- ophy of immanence reappears in the commentaries of Pomponatius on Aristotle and those of Marsilio Ficino on Plotinus. Giordano Bruno saw in God the monad of monads, who by an inward necessity pro- duces a material creation which is inseparable from Himself. Vanini made God immanent in the forces of nature, while, according to Jacob Biihme, God ac- quires reality only through the evolution of the world. By an unbroken tradition, then, the doctrine of imma- nence comes down to modern times. The Cartesian revolution seems even to favour its development. Exaggerating the distinction between soul and body, the former of which moves the latter by means of the pineal gland, the mechanical theories prepared the way for Malebranche's occasionalism: God alone acts; " there is but one true cause, because there is but one true God." Spinoza, too, admits only one cause. A disciple of Descartes in the geometrical rigour of his deductive processes, but still more a disciple of the rabbis and of Giordano Bruno in the spirit of his sys- tem, he sets up his natura naturans unfolding its at- tributes by an immanent progression. This is all but the revival of Alexandrian thought.
True Cartesianism, however, was not favourable to theories of this sort, for it is baseti on personal evi- dence, and it distinguishes sharply between the world and its transcendent cause. With its vivid realiza- tion of the importance and independence of the indi- vidual, it follows, rather, the Socratic tradition. That insight, defined and purified by Christianity, had all along served as a barrier against the encroachment of the doctrine of absolute immanence. It could not but derive fresh strength from the philosophy of Cogito, ergo sum, and it was indeed strengthened even to ex- cess. Jealous of its own immanence, which it had learned to know better than ever, the human mind overshot its first intention and turned the doctrine of absolute immanence to its own profit. At first it sought only to solve the problem of knowledge, while keeping entirely clear of empiricism. In the Kautian epoch it still claimed for itself only a relative imma- nence, for it believed in the existence of a transcendent Creator and admitted the existence of noumena, un- knowable, to be sure, but with which we maintain re- lations. Soon the temptation becomes stronger;
having hitherto pretended to impose its own laws on
knowable reality, thought now credits itself with the
power of creating that reality. For Fichte, in fact, the
ego not only posits knowledge, it also posits the non-
ego. It is the pre-eminent form of the Absolute
(Schelling). No longer is it the Substance that, as
natura naturans, produces the world by a process of
derivation and degratlation without limit; it is an
obscure germ, which in its ceaseless becoming, rises to
the point of becoming man, and at that point becomes
conscious of itself. The absolute becomes Hegel's
"idea", Schopenhauer's "will", Hartmann's "uncon-
scious", Renan's "time joined to the onward ten-
dency" (le Temps joint a la tendance aii progres),
Taine's "eternal axiom", Nietzsche's "superman",
Bergson's "conscience". Under all the forms of
evolutionistic monism, lies the doctrine of absolute
immanence.
Considering the religious tendencies of our age, it was inevitable that this doctrine should have its cor- responding effect in theology. The monism which it preaches, setting aside the idea of separateness be- tween God and the world, also removes entirely the distinction between the natural order and the super- natural. It denies anything transcendent in the supernatural, which, according to this theory, is only a conception springing from an irresistible need of the soul, or " the ceaseless palpitation of the soul panting for the infinite" (Buisson). The supernatural is but the product of our interior evolution; it is of imma- nent origin, for " it is in the heart of mankind that the Divine resides". "I am a man, and nothing Divine is foreign to me" (Buisson). Such is the origin of religion in this view. And herein we recognize the thesis of liberal Protestantism as well as that of the Modernists.
(b) The actual content of the doctrine of Absolute Immanence. — As it is nowadays presented, the doc- trine of absolute immanence is the resultant of the two great currents of contemporary thought. Kant, re- ducing everything to the individual consciousness, and declaring all metaphysical investigation to be illusory, locks the human soul in its own immanence and con- demns it thenceforth to agnosticism in regard to transcendent realities. The Positivist movement reaches the same terminus. Through mistrust of that reason which Kant had exalted to such a degree, Comte rejects as worthless every conclusion that goes beyond the range of experience. Thus the two sys- tems, setting out from opposite exaggerations, arrive at one and the same theory of the unknowable: nothing is left us now but to fall back upon ourselves and contemplate the phenomena which emerge from the depths of our own ego. We have no other means of information, and it is from this inner source that all knowledge, all faith, and all rules of conduct flow out by the immanent evolution of our life, or rather of the Divine, which thus manifests itself through us. This initial position determines the solutions which the doctrine of immanence furnishes for the problems concerning God and Man.
(i) God. — The problems of the Divine life and action are among the foremost to interest the parti- sans of absolute immanence. They talk incessantly of Trinity, Incarnation, and Redemption, but only, as they claim, to do away with the mysteries and to see in these theological terms merely the symbols that express the evolution of the' first principle. Philo's Trinity, like that of neo-Platonism, was an attempt to describe this evolution, and the moderns have only resuscitated the Alexandrian allegory. The great lacing, the great fetish, and the great medium (Comte), the evolving idea, the evolved idea, and their relation (Hegel), unity, variety and their relation (Cousin) — all these, in the thought of their originators, are but so many revivals of the Oriental myths. But conscience now demands the abolition of all such
