MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 99 



Hence, when once the personality of the First 

 Principle is reached in some other way — the way of 

 philosophy as distinguished from that of science — 

 science will then furnish the most abundant con- 

 firmations, the strongest corroborations ; the more 

 abundant and the stronger, in proportion as the First 

 Principle reached by philosophy ascends continuously 

 from materialism through deism and pantheism to 

 personal theism. For the traits in Nature and in 

 natural science that seem to point to a lower Princi- 

 ple, especially those that look so plausibly toward 

 pantheism, are better explicable by the theistic Prin- 

 ciple, when once true theism is reached ; and science 

 accords best with this purified theism, though in itself 

 quite unable to attain to the view. 



But the theism that science Vv^ill corroborate, or 

 that thorough philosophy can approve and estab- 

 lish, must be a theism that assumes into its con- 

 ceptions of God and man all the irrefutable insights 

 of materialism or of deism, and of pantheism most 

 of all. These insights reached on the planes of 

 lower philosophies have an unquestionable reality 

 and pertinence, if also they are marked by un- 

 deniable insufficiency. Their insufficiency, when 

 they are seen in the higher light of genuine theism, 

 is indeed so great that they seem by themselves 

 to have hardly any religious import at all. By 

 themselves, they afford the soul neither outward hope 



