CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



but to define him. In the different systems there 

 is a consensus of tendency to efface the distinction 

 between God and the universe (as commonly 

 understood), and to include God in the universe, 

 or the universe in God. Beyond the universe and 

 its forces there is nothing, and if we mean any- 

 thing at all by God, it can only be the eternal 

 activity, the endlessly fluctuating life which these 

 are evolving. All things taken together form a 

 unity, which however multiple in its forms, is yet 

 indivisible in the sense that we cannot segregate 

 one part of it as independent, and say that 

 the remainder is dependent upon this. All is 

 necessary, all is eternal, and this All, if you 

 choose, you may call God. The All is made up 

 of thoughts, and things, and processes, and if in 

 thinking of this complex aggregate you find it 

 necessary to seek some central principle of unity 

 for your thought, some underlying and abiding 

 substance, you may call it God, but you must 

 bear in mind that this God-substance exists only 

 in its forms and developments, and that these 

 all partake of each other, flowing into and out of 

 each other, the minds of men being God thinking, 

 things God at rest, and processes God in motion. 

 Between the different parts of this complex All, 

 it is plain there can be no moral relation, any 

 more than there can' be between the different 

 parts of a machine. All fit into each other to 

 form the unbroken unity, and all, therefore, are 

 equally good, or rather equally without character. 

 Moral relations require at least two thinking and 

 responsible beings to constitute them. One being 

 can have no duties. But if all the thinking of 

 the universe is that of one substance evolving 

 its thoughts at different points of projection, there 

 is no room for moral obligation, since there is 

 only one thinking Being. The idea of duties 

 between man and man that is, between one set 

 of the universe's or God's ideas and another, is 

 as inadmissible as the idea of duty as owing by 

 judgment to sensation, or by imagination to per- 

 ception. God being thus identified with the 

 universe, loses all personality. He has no rela- 

 tions, except internal and mechanical ones be- 

 tween his constituent parts. The investigation, 

 therefore, of his qualities can be nothing more 

 than an inquiry into the history of that perpetual 

 flux of development, in which we ourselves are 

 evanescent forms. Such an inquiry may be 

 amusing, but cannot have any ethical significance. 

 The history of opinion shews that the tendency 

 to a Pantheistic view of the universe is natural 

 to a very large class of minds. Universally and 

 always, it exerts a vast influence over religious 

 thought. Natural theology accounts for its exten- 

 sive prevalence chiefly on two grounds : i. The 

 difficulty of conceiving the creation of the uni- 

 verse ; and, 2. The natural preference of thought 

 for objective over subjective inquiries. There is 

 an acknowledged difficulty in conceiving the 

 world as coming into existence out of nothing. 

 To minds that have determined on regarding this 

 as inconceivable, but have not adverted to the 

 tact that the opposite is equally inconceivable, the 

 eternity of the universe becomes a necessary 

 belief. Thus existing uncaused, it is consistently 

 enough regarded as containing within itself the 

 sufficient ground of all its phenomena. Existing 

 necessarily, all that it produces are necessary 

 evolutions, and among these thought takes its 



378 



place without difficulty, being not less easy to 

 regard as a necessary growth of nature than the 

 order which prevails in the world. Having 

 assigned thought in general to this origin, the 

 observer almost, as a matter of course, puts him- 

 self among the other necessary evolutions which 

 together make up the universe. 



It is to this superficial treatment of himself and 

 his own consciousness that the natural theologian 

 ascribes what he regards as the radical error of 

 the Pantheistic theorist. He has begun at the 

 wrong end. Instead of commencing with what 

 is nearest and surest namely, himself and his 

 own experience, he has commenced with what 

 is most distant and doubtful, the external world 

 and its origin. Instead of interpreting the ex- 

 ternal by the light of principles yielded by the 

 internal, he forces upon the internal a definition 

 gathered solely from contemplation of the external 

 world. On such a perverse method, it was 

 scarcely possible to escape error. Looking only, 

 as first impulses suggest, upon the external world, 

 and regarding it, as on the hypothesis of its 

 eternal and necessary existence it must be re- 

 garded, as a self-acting state of things, producing 

 mechanically and inevitably all that appears, it 

 is not unnatural to conceive thinking beings and 

 their thoughts as homogeneous elements in the 

 whole, and then tacitly to transfer this view of 

 thought as a phenomenon to one's own thought 

 and self. But here, it is said, the fatal mistake is 

 committed of not remarking the gulf that lies 

 between the objective and the subjective. By no 

 possibility can we identify ourselves with the 

 world as generically similar parts of the same 

 unity. The me and the not-me, the self of which 

 we are conscious, and the phenomenal of which 

 we are not conscious, will not coalesce. Our own 

 personality stands out as a stubborn and irre- 

 ducible datum of thought. We cannot think of 

 ourselves as another substance thinking. Be the 

 external universe what it may, we are one being, 

 and it is another. The more we scrutinise our 

 own consciousness, the more deeply do we become 

 convinced that so far from the arrangements of the 

 universe producing thought, it must be thought 

 that lies at the foundation of the arrangements of 

 the universe. In calling this thought God, we 

 place it outside and separate from ourselves. We 

 cannot recognise ourselves as part of God, as 

 God thinking. Such a description has no mean- 

 ing to us. We are one thinker, God is another ; 

 we within the sphere of our own consciousness ; 

 He within the sphere of the external universe. 



These deliverances of consciousness, it is con- 

 tended, are the surest and most authoritative of all 

 the elements of our knowledge, and should be 

 made the standard by which all our other con- 

 ceptions and conclusions are tried. In presence 

 of these, every other opinion inconsistent with 

 them should give way. It is in virtue of this 

 paramount authority of the testimony of conscious- 

 ness that natural theology holds the Pantheistic 

 hypothesis untenable. We know ourselves to be 

 separate and independent personalities, and in 

 relation to us God also must be a personality; 

 Infinite, it may be, in his qualities, and beyond 

 our power of adequately comprehending, but still 

 personal in his position towards us, since He and 

 we are outside each other. The relations between 

 us being thus personal, can also be moral. There 



