Pantheism's destruction of boundaries - pagina 14

PaniJie'ism' s Destruction

of Boundaries.

marked bouiidaiy line lies between God and tlie world; and with the taking away of this line all other boundaries are blurred into mere shadows. For every distinction made in' our consciousness ness to

make

— aye, the very faculty

distinctions

— takes

I'oot

itself

1

of onr conscious-

at last in this primordial

Tiiink it away, and it becomes night, in whose shadowy darkness everything in our horizon dissolves in a somBut every pantheist starts out with the denial of this ber gray. primordial antithesis, which is mother to every antithesis among antithesis.

creatures.

The

pantheist stands ready, the

moment we open our

No, not "in the beginning," he says, for there was no beginning; not "created," for the world is eternal and not ''the heaven and the earth," for the beyond is a mere dream. In this way the three most deeply marked lines of our distinction are wiped out with a single stroke, and every boundary is taken away between God and the world, between time and eternity, between the here And yet, i^antheism must needs begin with jand the hereafter. the revocation of these antitheses. It can do no other. As far as histoiy extends our thinking travels along a smooth path, but stops at the point where history began, as well as at the There it finds before and behind point where histoi*y ends. it a bottomless abyss, over which it dares not leap, and which is much less to be spatmed by a bridge; and hence it must, at any price, cipher away both that end and that beginning. For the pantheist tlieie is no existence of God and the world thinkable as two individual substances. Objection may be made by reminding us of what we stated above, namely, that it is another wind which blows in the Bible, to invalidate the solemn inaugural of Genesis.

;

higher circles of science

;

that in those better circles pantheism,

together with nniterialism, has long since been shown the door;

and while the no7i liquet is freely expressed concerning the origin, basis, and end of things, there is general content to inquire more carefully into the phenomena of tlie natural and the spiritual world, and to live on poetry for the heart. And this But has the principle of evolution, or the DesGcndenzis 60. theoricy as the Germans call it, therefore ceased to be the Credo of the science of our day? And what is this evolution theory other than the aj^plication of the pantheistic process to the

empiric investigation of phenomena?

llei-e, also,

the

^^

natura

'

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