Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/134

This page needs to be proofread.
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM
73

nation, the doctrine of a Divine Humanity. So when theology sets the doctrine of the Triune God at the centre of practical religion, pantheism has prepared the way for vindicating it as in so far the genuine interpreter of rational theism. That the Eternal is eternally generated in our higher human nature; that this Son of Man is in practical truth the Son of God, and the Son only-begotten; that by the discipline of life in worlds of imperfection, men — and, following men, the whole world of conscious beings — ascend, through fealty to this Son, immortally toward the Father in the Holy Spirit, — this, the epitome of Christian theism, first gets apprehended, or at least suggested, in the insight which pantheism brings, that God is not separate from the world, but effectually present in it, and that the distinction between the soul and the God who recognises and redeems it can never be truly stated as a distinction in place and time, a separation in space and by a period, a contrast between efficient cause and produced effect. On the contrary, the distinction must be made in terms of pure thought, which is essentially timeless and spaceless, neither lasts nor extends, nor is dated nor placed, but simply is. It must be viewed as a contrast (and yet a relation) between different centres of consciousness, each thoroughly self-active; and further, as a distinction in the mode by which each conscious centre defines