PANTHEISM. 255- 



and heretic, he consoles himself with the thought that 

 he suffers in company with G. Bruno, Spinoza, Lessing, 

 and Goethe. 



Far be it from me to insinuate anything to the 

 prejudice of those who have from one cause or another 

 shaken their minds loose from the dogmas of the 

 Christian religion, and to question their conscientious- 

 ness and love of truth. On the contrary, they are to 

 be honoured in having the courage to express what 

 are, no doubt, their sincere convictions. But with 

 these doctrines, which he presses forward in an enthu- 

 siastic and almost fanatical spirit, we cannot but see 

 that Ha'ckel must prejudge the question of the origin 

 of living matter. He accepts the self- existence of 

 matter and force from eternity, and our first know- 

 ledge of them is in the form of the " gasiform chaos" 

 of Laplace. Then, as living matter could not exist 

 in our globe till after it was sufficiently cooled down 



he ridicules the idea of a Personal Creator as an immaterial being or 

 spirit, which last is commonly thought of as a kind of gas or sether 

 (i. p. 173). Nor will the above paragraph in the text look any better 

 if we translate the word " Geist" as mind, instead of spirit. The word 

 " divine" would therefore apply to a kind of infinite mind, bearing a 

 similar relation to the interactions of the matter and force of the uni- 

 verse as our minds do to our brains. But this mind, according to 

 Hackel's own showing, could not do anything, or have the slightest in- 

 fluence on the phenomena or events of the universe, nor would it ap~ 

 patently be conscious truly not a sublime idea of God ! But even, 

 this is not consistent with his own showing elsewhere, for he denies 

 the existence of thought anywhere except as the attribute of the 

 matter of the brains of the higher vertebrates, and combining with 

 this the common idea of mind and spirit in the being of God, he says, 

 " We thus reach the paradoxical conception of a gasiform vertebrate 

 a contradictio in adjecto" (i. 174). I hardly think we can be accused 

 of injustice if we regard this Monismus or Pantheism as indistin- 

 guishable from Atheism. 



