MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 75 



short of the conception demanded by the highest 

 practical reUgion. For religion as a practical power 

 in human experience — the very conception of 

 theism as an operative life in the spirit — depends 

 not merely on the omnipresent influence of God, 

 but equally on the freedom and the immortality of 

 the soul : on its freedom in the strictest sense; that 

 is, its unqualified autonomy and self-activity. In 

 fact, not only is it impossible for souls to be souls, 

 apart from freedom, immortality, and God, but it is 

 just as impossible for God to be God, apart from 

 souls and their immortality and freedom. In other 

 words, the self-existent perfection of deity itself 

 freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession 

 of a world that is in God's own image, and such a 

 control of it as is alone consistent with its being so : 

 a divine creation must completely reflect the divine 

 nature, and must therefore be a world of moral 

 freedom, autonomous, and, in the last resort, self- 

 active or eternal. 



But this requirement of genuine and fulfilled the- 

 ism, pantheism cannot meet. Its theory, whether 

 atheistic or acosmic or agnostic or absolute-ideal- 

 istic, is the radical contradiction of real freedom 

 and significant immortality.^ Indeed we may say, 



1 For some detailed illustrations of this, especially with reference 

 to " absolute " idealism and evolutional itlealism, see Tlie Conception 

 of God, pp. 89-127. 



