OF THE SPIRIT. 289 



spread, especially among the creative intellects which 

 regenerated German literature and art. For some of 

 these it marks probably only a passing, though an im- 

 portant, phase of their mental development. The 

 pantheism of Spinoza lends itself readily to a poetical 

 interpretation ; it stands on a higher level than the 

 mechanical view which represents the Divine Being, 

 at most, as an artificer who stands outside of his cre- 

 ation ; but it has no room for the ideas of personality, 

 individuality, and freedom, and still less has it an under- 

 standing for the facts of sin and redemption : it harmon- 

 ises with the classical but hardly with the Christian 

 ideal. It taught the immanence of the Divine Spirit in 

 the whole of creation and, as such, inspired poets and 

 thinkers alike, but it had no comprehension for the 

 transcendence of the Divine personality, and yet this was 

 ingrained in the thought of the age through the histori- 

 cal religion with its Divine Founder and the conception 

 of the moral law as a divine revelation. 



The many attempts which were made under the influ- 

 ence of Spinozism to establish a monistic view yielded 

 again and again to the deep-seated conviction, character- 

 istic of Christian thought, that for us human beings there 

 exists a twofold order of things : the natural and the 

 spiritual or moral order; that the divine is revealed 

 to humanity not only in nature but independently also 

 through the immediate working of the spirit in the 

 individual and historical life of man. 



Thus we find that for various reasons thinkers like 

 Fichte, Schelling, and still more Schleiermacher, in their 

 later speculations, emancipated themselves from the all- 



VOL. IV. T 



