GOD AND THE WORLD. 295 



the supreme being, is infinite in perfection, and there- 

 fore far removed from the imperfection of humanity. 

 Yet, when we examine closely, we always find the 

 same psychic or mental activity in the two. God 

 feels, thinks, and acts as man does, although it be in 

 an infinitely more perfect form. 



The personal anthropism of God has become so 

 natural to the majority of believers that they expe- 

 rience no shock when they find God personified in 

 human form in pictures and statues, and in the varied 

 images of the poet, in which God takes human form — 

 that is, is changed into a vertebrate. In some 

 myths even God takes the form of other mammals (an 

 ape, lion, bull, etc.), and more rarely of a bird (eagle, 

 dove, or stork), or of some lower vertebrate (serpent, 

 crocodile, dragon, etc.). 



In the higher and more abstract forms of religion 

 this idea of bodily appearance is entirely abandoned, 

 and God is adored asa " pure spirit " without a body. 

 " God is a spirit, and they who worship him must 

 worship him in spirit and in truth." Nevertheless, 

 the psychic activity of this " pure spirit " remains just 

 the same as that of the anthropomorphic God. In 

 reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived to 

 be incorporeal, but merely invisible, gaseous. We 

 thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a 

 gaseous vertebrate. 



II. PANTHEISM. 



Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one. 

 The idea of God is identical with that of nature or 

 substance. This pantheistic view is sharply opposed 

 in principle to all the systems we have described, and 



