Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/123

This page needs to be proofread.
62
ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

judgment as defective, and consequently be reckoned opinions injurious if taken as final.

But let us now ask in earnest what pantheism exactly is. In beginning our answer, we may avail ourselves of a useful clue in the structure of the name itself. The derivation of this from the two Greek words πᾶν (all) and θέος (God) would seem to make it mean either (1) that the All is God, or else (2) that God is all — that God alone really and actively exists. The name, then, hints at two quite different doctrines. It may signify either (1) that the total of particular existences is God, in other words, that the universe, as we commonly understand it, is itself the only real being; or (2) that God, the absolute Being, is the only actively real being — all particular existences are merely his forms of appearance, and so, in truth, are either illusions or have an aspect of illusion haunting such partial reality as they possess. Of these diverse doctrines we might convey now the one and now the other by the name, according as we pronounced it pantheism or pantheism. In either way the word unavoidably covers an absolute identification of God and other being. In the first way, God is merged in the universe; in the second, the universe is merged in God.

As a matter of history, too, pantheism has actually presented itself in these two forms. The doc-