creation; it abides immanently in this, and is no longer conceived as separate and therefore itself limited in space and in time. This faulty conception of God as temporally and spatially conditioned, characteristic of the cruder dualistic view of things with which human efforts at theological theory begin, is overcome by pantheism, at least in part. But the pantheistic interpretation of immanence, as will appear farther on, is itself very gravely deficient: quite irreconcilable, in fact, with the conditions of a genuine theism, or with those of a genuine religion.
III
But the eminent merit of pantheism as contrasted with deism, we have now reached the position to see. By the name “deism” it has been generally, if tacitly, agreed to designate that falling short of theism which stands at the opposite pole from pantheism. If pantheism is defective by confounding God and the world in an anti-moral identity, deism comes short by setting God in an isolated and impassable separation from the world. Deism thus falls partly under the same condemnation of materiality that a rational judgment pronounces upon sensuous theism, with its zoomorphic[1] con-
- ↑ Falsely called “anthropomorphic,” since the properly human form of being is the rational, not the physiological, and the faulty “anthropomorphism” of which nowadays we hear so much complaint, consists exactly in construing the nature and action of God in terms of our sensuous life and its conditions.
