GOD AND THE WORLD. 297 



master, Thales, or his pupil, Anaximenes. Not only 

 the great thought of the original unity of the cosmos 

 and the development of all phenomena out of the all- 

 pervading primitive matter found expression in Anaxi- 

 mander, but he even enunciated the bold idea of 

 countless worlds in a periodic alternation of birth and 

 death. 



Many other great philosophers of classical antiquity, 

 especially Democritus, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, 

 had, in the same or an analogous sense, a profound 

 conception of this unity of nature and God, of body 

 and spirit, which has obtained its highest expression 

 in the law of substance of our modern monism. The 

 famous Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius Carus, 

 has presented it in a highly poetic form in his poem, 

 " De Rerum Natura." However, this true pantheistic 

 monism was soon entirely displaced by the mystic 

 dualism of Plato, and especially by the powerful 

 influence which the idealistic philosophy obtained by 

 its blending with Christian dogmas. When the papacy 

 attained to its spiritual despotism over the world, 

 pantheism was hopelessly crushed ; Giordano Bruno, 

 its most gifted defender, was burnt alive by the 

 " Vicar of Christ " in the Campo dei Fiori at Rome on 

 February 17th, 1600. 



It was not until the middle of the seventeenth 

 century that pantheism was exhibited in its purest 

 form by the great Baruch Spinoza ; he gave for the 

 totality of things a definition of substance in which 

 God and the world are inseparably united. The 

 clearness, confidence, and consistency of Spinoza's 

 monistic system are the more remarkable when we 

 remember that this gifted thinker of 250 years ago 

 was without the support of all those sound empirical 



