MODERiY SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM jy 



ideal or divine life. To no theory of the world can 

 man give a willing and a cordial adhesion, then, if 

 it strikes at the heart of his personal reality and 

 contradicts those hopes of ceaseless moral growth 

 that alone make life worth living. Not in its state- 

 ment of God as the All-in-all, taken by itself, but 

 in its consequent denial of the reality of man — his 

 freedom and immortal growth in goodness — is it 

 that pantheism betrays its insufficiency to meet the 

 needs of the human spirit. 



It is no doubt true that this opposition between 

 the doctrine of a Sole Reality and our natural 

 longings for permanence, our natural bias in favour 

 of freedom and responsibility, in itself settles nothing 

 as to the truth or falsity of the doctrine. It might 

 be that the system of Nature, it might be that its 

 Ground, is not in sympathy or accord with " the 

 bliss for which we sigh." But so long as human 

 nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence 

 prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for 

 a life that may put death itself beneath our feet, 

 and with death imperfection and wrong, so long 

 will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt, 

 at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of 

 pantheism ; so long shall we instinctively draw back 

 from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it con- 

 scious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable, 

 must for us and our highest hopes be verily the 



