326 MAN AND GOD. 



tinctlon was not preferable to an unjustifiable con- 

 fusion. It seems doubtful whether an assertion of 

 the unity of things which left no room for the recog- 

 nition of their difference was a change for the better. 

 Certainly philosophy has since had occasion to 

 repent of its hasty identification of the Deity with 

 the unity of the universe, and to lament the failure 

 of every system which attempted to understand the 

 world on this assumption. Bitter experience alone 

 of the impotence of philosophy, of the stagnation 

 and retrogression of metaphysics, which have now 

 dropped as far behind the physical sciences as they 

 were ahead of them 2,000 years ago, might have 

 raised doubts as to the correctness of this funda- 

 mental assumption of philosophy. And those 

 doubts our examination will fully confirm. 



§ 10. The conception of the Deity adopted by 

 philosophic pantheism is from every point of view a 

 mistake. Emotionally it is a mistake, because the 

 philosophic Infinite is not God, and cannot satisfy 

 the religious emotions. Scientifically it is a mistake, 

 because it is not a principle which is capable of ex- 

 plaining anything in or about the world. Logically 

 it is a mistake, because it is grounded upon fallacies 

 and paralogisms. 



Emotionally Pantheism is disastrous, because it 

 has destroyed the soil on which alone human emo- 

 tions can develop. Religious emotion is destroyed 

 by the fact that the god of Pantheism is, to all 

 intents and purposes, fiothing. Moral activity is 

 destroyed by the fact that the distinctions of Good 

 and Evil, Right and Wrong, what is and what ought' 

 to be, must to Pantheism be ev-er and entirely un- 



meanmof. 



Scientific activity is destroyed by the fact that 



