204 THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 



if we wish to connect anything at all with this 

 idea of God, we can think of Him only as a God 

 whom we can imagine. 



There is here a great discrepancy between 

 my philosophical opinions and those of Dr. 

 Thesing. According to Christian philosophy, 

 God is not a point, nor a nothing, nor a bodily 

 form such as we can imagine by aid of our 

 senses, but He is a pure spirit, universally 

 present in virtue of His infinity. That we must 

 imagine God, in order to be able to think of 

 Him, is an anthropomorphic view that is quite 

 untenable. Haeckel had such an idea of God, 

 when he said that he could think of the person- 

 ality of God only in bodily form as a ' gaseous 

 vertebrate.' Dr. Plotz, too, had a similar idea, 

 when he spoke of God as an * organism ' (p. 177). 

 This erroneous idea has spread unfortunately 

 very widely in so-called educated circles, as a 

 consequence of the publication of Haeckel's 

 Weltrdtsel and similar books. People believe 

 that the ' Personal God ' of Christianity must 

 be imagined as a sort of higher mammal, and 

 as an illustration I may quote a letter written 

 in Berlin, which seriously propounds the follow- 

 ing objection to the iheistic conception of God : 



'To imagine a personal ( = corporeal ?) 

 Creator as the first living being is probably 

 impossible, for the question arises involun- 



