THE Rev. J. H. Blunt, in his "Dictionary of Sects, Heresies, etc.,"
defines Pantheists as "those who hold that God is everything, and
everything is God."
If it is granted that the value of words lies in the definiteness and
coherency of the ideas that present themselves to us when the words
are heard or spoken-then such a sentence as "God is everything and
everything is God" is worthless.
For we have so long associated the word "God" with the idea of a Living
Person, who can see, hear, will, feel pleasure, displeasure, etc., that
we cannot think of God, and also of something which we have not been
accustomed to think of as a Living Person, at one and the same time, so
as to connect the two ideas and fuse them into a coherent thought. While
we are thinking of the one, our minds involuntarily exclude the other,
and vice versa; so that it is as impossible for us to think of anything
as God, or as forming part of God, which we cannot also think of as a
Person, or as a part of a Person, as it is to produce a hybrid between
two widely distinct animals. If I am not mistaken, the barrenness of
inconsistent ideas, and the sterility of widely distant species or
genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of hybrids
being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas arising from
inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent conception. I have
insisted on this at some length in "Life and Habit," but can do so no
further here. (Note: Butler returned to this subject in "Luck, or
cunning?" which was originally published in 1887.}
In like manner we have so long associated the word "Person" with the
idea of a substantial visible body, limited in extent, and animated
by an invisible something which we call Spirit, that we can think of
nothing as a person which does not also bring these ideas before us. Any
attempt to make us imagine God as a Person who does not fulfil [sic] the
conditions which our ideas attach to the word "person," is ipso facto
atheistic, as rendering the word God without meaning, and therefore
without reality, and therefore non-existent to us. Our ideas are like
our organism, they will stand a vast amount of modification if it is
effected slowly and without shock, but the life departs out of them,
leaving the form of an idea without the power thereof, if they are
jarred too rudely.
Any being, then, whom we can imagine as God, must have all the
qualities, capabilities, and also all the limitations which are implied
when the word "person" is used.
But, again, we cannot conceive of "everything" as a person. "Everything"
must comprehend all that is to be found on earth, or outside of it,
and we know of no such persons as this. When we say "persons" we intend
living people with flesh and blood; sometimes we extend our conceptions
to animals and plants, but we have not hitherto done so as generally as
I hope we shall some day come to do. Below animals and plants we have
never in any seriousness gone. All that we have been able to regard as
personal has had what we can call a living body, even though that
body is vegetable only; and this body has been tangible, and has been
comprised within certain definite limits, or within limits which have at
any rate struck the eye as definite. And every part within these limits
has been animated by an unseen something which we call soul or spirit. A
person must be a persona--that is to say, the living mask and mouthpiece
of an energy saturating it, and speaking through it. It must be animate
in all its parts.
But "everything" is not animate. Animals and plants alone produce in us
those ideas which can make reasonable people call them "persons" with
consistency of intention. We can conceive of each animal and of each
plant as a person; we can conceive again of a compound person like the
coral polypes [sic], or like a tree which is composed of a congeries of
subordinate persons, inasmuch as each bud is a separate and individual
plant. We can go farther than this, and, as I shall hope to show,
we ought to do so; that is to say, we shall find it easier and more
agreeable with our other ideas to go farther than not; for we should
see all animal and vegetable life as united by a subtle and till lately
invisible ramification, so that all living things are one tree-like
growth, forming a single person. But we cannot conceive of oceans,
continents, and air as forming parts of a person at all; much less
can we think of them as forming one person with the living forms that
inhabit them.
To ask this of us is like asking us to see the bowl and the water in
which three gold-fish are swimming as part of the gold-fish. We cannot
do it any more than we can do something physically impossible. We can
see the gold-fish as forming one family, and therefore as in a way
united to the personality of the parents from which they sprang, and
therefore as members one of another, and therefore as forming a single
growth of gold-fish, as boughs and buds unite to form a tree; but we
cannot by any effort of the imagination introduce the bowl and the water
into the personality, for we have never been accustomed to think of such
things as living and personal. Those, therefore, who tell us that "God
is everything, and everything is God," require us to see "everything"
as a person, which we cannot; or God as not a person, which again we
cannot.
Continuing the article of Mr. Blunt from which I have already quoted, I
read:--
"Linus, in a passage which has been preserved by Stobaeus, exactly
expresses the notion afterwards adopted by Spinoza: 'One sole energy
governs all things; all things are unity, and each portion is All; for
of one integer all things were born; in the end of time all things shall
again become unity; the unity of multiplicity.' Orpheus, his disciple,
taught no other doctrine."
According to Pythagoras, "an adept in the Orphic philosophy," "the soul
of the world is the Divine energy which interpenetrates every portion
of the mass, and the soul of man is an efflux of that energy. The world,
too, is an exact impress of the Eternal Idea, which is the mind of God."
John Scotus Erigena taught that "all is God and God is all." William
of Champeaux, again, two hundred years later, maintained that "all
individuality is one in substance, and varies only in its non-essential
accidents and transient properties." Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant
followed the theory out "into a thoroughgoing Pantheism." Amalric held
that "All is God and God is all. The Creator and the creature are one
Being. Ideas are at once creative and created, subjective and objective.
God is the end of all, and all return to Him. As every variety of
humanity forms one manhood, so the world contains individual forms
of one eternal essence." David of Dinant only varied upon this by
"imagining a corporeal unity. Although body, soul, and eternal substance
are three, these three are one and the same being."
Giordano Bruno maintained the world of sense to be "a vast animal having
the Deity for its living soul." The inanimate part of the world is
thus excluded from participation in the Deity, and a conception that
our minds can embrace is offered us instead of one which they cannot
entertain, except as in a dream, incoherently. But without such a view
of evolution as was prevalent at the beginning of this century, it was
impossible to see "the world of sense" intelligently, as forming "a vast
animal." Unless, therefore, Giordano Bruno held the opinions of Buffon,
Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with more definiteness than I am
yet aware of his having done, his contention must be considered as a
splendid prophecy, but as little more than a prophecy. He continues,
"Birth is expansion from the one centre of Life; life is its
continuance, and death is the necessary return of the ray to the centre
of light." This begins finely, but ends mystically. I have not, however,
compared the English translation with the original, and must reserve a
fuller examination of Giordano Bruno's teaching for another opportunity.
Spinoza disbelieved in the world rather than in God. He was an Acosmist,
to use Jacobi's expression, rather than an Atheist. According to him,
"the Deity and the Universe are but one substance, at the same time
both spirit and matter, thought and extension, which are the only known
attributes of the Deity."
My readers will, I think, agree with me that there is very little of the
above which conveys ideas with the fluency and comfort which accompany
good words. Words are like servants: it is not enough that we should
have them-we must have the most able and willing that we can find, and
at the smallest wages that will content them. Having got them we must
make the best and not the worst of them. Surely, in the greater part of
what has been quoted above, the words are barren letters only: they do
not quicken within us and enable us to conceive a thought, such as we
can in our turn impress upon dead matter, and mould [sic] that matter
into another shape than its own, through the thought which has become
alive within us. No offspring of ideas has followed upon them, or, if
any at all, yet in such unwonted shape, and with such want of alacrity,
that we loathe them as malformations and miscarriages of our minds.
Granted that if we examine them closely we shall at length find them
to embody a little germ of truth-that is to say, of coherency with our
other ideas; but there is too little truth in proportion to the trouble
necessary to get at it. We can get more truth, that is to say, more
coherency-for truth and coherency are one-for less trouble in other
ways.
But it may be urged that the beginnings of all tasks are difficult and
unremunerative, and that later developments of Pantheism may be more
intelligible than the earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not the
case. On continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a
hundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling,
Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed
into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we
doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can do
nothing with them but look at them and pass them by.
In my next chapter I propose to show the end which the early Pantheists
were striving after, and the reason and naturalness of their error.