ultimate terms of his omniscience and omnipotence. For genuine omniscience and omnipotence are only to be realised in the control of free beings, and in inducing the divine image in them by moral influences instead of metaphysical and physical agencies: that is, by final instead of efficient causation.
II
It will help us toward an exacter understanding of pantheism to appreciate its relations to other anti-theistic forms of philosophy, particularly to materialism, and also to objective and to subjective idealism. With this appreciation, it will become clear that pantheism constitutes a synthesis of thought higher than either of these theories. The pantheistic conception of the world may indeed be read off in either materialistic or idealistic terms, but neither reading reaches its whole meaning. Besides, the twofold reading holds good whether we take pantheism in its atheistic or its acosmic form. On a first inspection, to be sure, this double interpretability hardly seems to be the fact. On the contrary, one is at first inclined to identify atheistic pantheism with materialism outright, and to recognise in acosmic pantheism a species of mysticism or exaggerated spiritualism;[1] hence, to con-
- ↑ “Der pantheistischen Mystik ist wirklich Gott Alles, dem gemeinen Pantheismus ist alles Gott,” — quotes Dr. Martineau from Rothe, very significantly, in the title-page of his Spinoza.
