296 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



to all possible forms of theism ; although there have 

 been many attempts made from both sides to bridge 

 over the deep chasm that separates the two. There is 

 always this fundamental contradiction between them, 

 that in theism God is opposed to nature as an extra- 

 mundane being, as creating and sustaining the world, 

 and acting upon it from without, while in pantheism 

 God, as an intramnndane being, is everywhere identical 

 with nature itself, and is operative within the world 

 as " force " or " energy." The latter view alone is 

 compatible with our supreme law — the law of sub- 

 stance. It follows necessarily that pantheism is the 

 world-system of the modern scientist. There are, it is 

 true, still a few men of science who contest this, and 

 think it possible to reconcile the old theistic theory of 

 human nature with the pantheistic truth of the law of 

 substance. All these effects rest on confusion or 

 sophistry — when they are honest. 



As pantheism is a result of an advanced conception 

 of nature in the civilised mind, it is naturally much 

 younger than theism, the crudest forms of which are 

 found in great variety in the uncivilised races of ten 

 thousand years ago. We do, indeed, find the germs 

 of pantheism in different religions at the very dawn 

 of philosophy in the earliest civilized peoples (in India, 

 Egypt, China, and Japan), several thousand years 

 before the time of Christ ; still, we do not meet a 

 definite philosophical expression of it until the hylo- 

 zoism of the Ionic philosophers, in the first half of 

 the sixth century before Christ. All the great thinkers 

 of this flourishing period of Hellenic thought are sur- 

 passed by the famous Anaximander of Miletus, who 

 conceived the essential unity of the infinite universe 

 (apeiron) more profoundly and more clearly than his 



