Introductory. 



origin, mainly pantheism, and consisted in a systematic 

 contemplation of this world as it is, with a certain 

 religiosity indeed, but without supernatural (as distin- 

 guished from preternatural) aspirations or the idea of 

 holiness. Its religious conceptions were drawn from phy- 

 sical nature, reposed on natural phenomena, and taking 

 such nature as she is, logically resulted in rites which 

 answered both to her joyous and to her gloomy aspects. 

 Moreover, the philosophy of the ancient pagan world wa? 

 in this respect in harmony with its religion. 



" It was from a physical point of view of the world, and 

 a desire to reduce it to a physical unity, that Greek 

 philosophy took its start ; and the confusion of God with 

 the world, as it was involved in its beginning, so remains 

 its great error during the course of nine hundred years, 

 from Thales to Plotinus. In the seventh century before 

 Christ, the wise men of Greece all proceeded from the 

 expressed or the tacit assumption of one world-forming 

 force, whether they considered this as bound up with 

 matter or as severed from it, whether they called it 

 nature or the divine, or by any other name. This con- 

 ception forms the common basis of the mechanical 

 doctrine of nature on the one hand, and of the dynamical 

 doctrine of nature on the other. All the various schools 

 of materialistic pantheism, of which the Ionic is the first, 

 spring from the former ; all the various schools of ideal- 

 istic pantheism, of which the Eleatic is the first, spring 



