CHAPTER VI - THE OBJECTION THAT THE ABOVE VIEW IMPLIES PANTHEISM, ANSWERED

Summary

It will be observed that the views presented in the last three chapters are closely connected with one another, and all conditioned on the “Relation of God to Nature” urged in Chapter III. Now it will doubtless be objected to this view, especially as applied in Chapter IV on the “Relation of Man to Nature” that it is naught else than pure pantheism; that it destroys completely the personality of Deity, and with it all our hopes of communion with him, and all our aspirations of love and worship toward him; that, according to this view, God becomes only the soul or animating principle of Nature, operating everywhere but unconsciously like the vital principle of an organism; that the whole cosmos becomes in fact a great organism, developing under the operation of resident force according to necessary law, only that we apotheosize this omnipresent force and call it God; and finally, that God is naught else than an abstraction, created like other abstractions or general ideas wholly by the human mind, and having no objective existence.

Furthermore, it will be said, that according to this view, this omnipresent unconscious energy individuates itself by necessary law of evolution more and more until it reaches, for the first time in man, self-consciousness and immortality, and thus that man himself is the only self-conscious immortal being in existence, and therefore the only being worthy of reverence and worship.