MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 65 



ultimate terms of his omniscience and omnipotence. 

 For genuine omniscience and omnipotence are only 

 to be realised in the control of free beings, and in 

 inducing the divine image in them by moral inflitcnces 

 instead of inctapJiysical and physical agencies : that is, 

 by final instead of efficient causation. 



II 



It will help us toward an exacter understanding 

 of pantheism to appreciate its relations to other 

 anti-theistic forms of philosophy, particularly to 

 materialism, and also to objective and to subjective 

 idealism. With this appreciation, it will become 

 clear that pantheism constitutes a synthesis of 

 thought higher than either of these theories. The 

 pantheistic conception of the world may indeed be 

 read off in either materialistic or idealistic terms, 

 but neither reading reaches its whole meaning. 

 Besides, the twofold reading holds good whether we 

 take pantheism in its atheistic or its acosmic form. 

 On a first inspection, to be sure, this double inter- 

 pretability hardly seems to be the fact. On the 

 contrary, one is at first inclined to identify atheis- 

 tic pantheism with materialism outright, and to 

 recognise in acosmic pantheism a species of mys- 

 ticism or exaggerated spiritualism;^ hence, to con- 



1 '^ Dcr panlheisiischcn Mystik ist wirklich Gott Alles, dem gemeinen 

 Fantheismus ist alles Gott," — (juotes Dr. Martineau from Rothe, very 

 significantly, in the tille-pagc of his Spinoza. 



F 



