3. Greek Panthtism, — Those who distinguish in philos-
PANTHEISM
619
PANTHEISM
ophy between science and ethics — the former dealing with what is, the latter with what ought to be — point us to Hindii speculation as philosophy within the swaddling bands of theology, and claim that it Avas left for (ireece to free man's mind from these tram- mels. Yet the philosophy of the Greeks in its earli- est forms has a decidedly Oriental coloring, and natu- rally so, for Greece received its first ideas of civilization from Egypt and the East. Thales, indeed, professed the dualism of Chaktea and Egypt. The Orphic doc- trines— which embody the teaching of Linus and of his disciple Orpheus— from their verj' remote antiquity are shrouded in mystery. But they are supposed by Dr. Cudworth (IntelL Si/stem, ii, 94) and other eminent modern philosophers to have been pantheistic in their character. The material world is termed " the body of Zeus" in a poetic fragment said to have been written by Orpheus. At a later period we find the doctrine of emanations taught by Pythagoras (q. v.), an adept in ancient Orpliic theology, and by other Greek philos- ophers, more especially by Xenophanes (q. v.), the found- er of the Eleatic school (see Eleatic Scitoot-; and compare Creuzer, Sijmholik; Irena;us, Introd. xlii-xlv, Cambr. ed. ; Aristotle, De Xenophane, iii ; Diogenes Laertius, ii, 19; De Ginando, i, vi). Pythagoras (B.C. 569-470) taught that "one is all and all in a wide de- velopment of the unit. The monad produces the dyad ; the two constitute the triad, and the product symbolizes the absolute unity that holds, as it were, in free solu- tion spirit and matter. Unity becomes a multiple of itself by factors of increasing power, and this multiple is the universe, the very beginning of the divin'e unity, quickened in all its parts with the divine life. The soul of the world is the divine energy that interpene- trates every portion of the mass, and the soul of man is an efHux of that energy. The world, too, is an ex- act impress of the eternal idea, which is the mind of God." A poetical theogony was easily in!,n-afted on such notions, and a polytheistic religion for the i)eople. The philosophy of Anaximander (B.C. 610-547) the Milesian may almost, with equal accuracy, be described as a system of atheistic physics or of materialistic pan- theism. Its leading idea is thnt from the infinite or intermediate (ru «;rf(poi'), which is "one yet all," pro- ceed the entire phenomena of the universe, and to it they return. Xenophanes (B.C. 620-520), who, bj-^ the way, was the author of the famous metaphysical mot, " Ex nihilo, nihil fit," is really the first classical thinker who promulgated the higher or idealistic form of pan- theism. Denying the possibility of creatio", he argued that there exists only an eternal, infinite one or all, of which individual objects and existences are merely il- lusory modes of representation ; but as Aristotle finely expresses it — and it is this last conception which gives to the pantheism of Xenophanes its distinctive char- acter— -"casting his e3-es wistfully upon the whole heaven, he pronounced that unity to be God." Hera- clitus (q. v.), who flourished a century later, reverted to the material pantheism of the Ionic school, and ap- pears to have held that the " all" first arrives at con- sciousness in man, whereas Xenophanes attributed to the same universal entity intelligence and self-exist- ence, denying it only personality. But it is often ex- tremely difficult, if not impossible, to draw or to see the distinction between the pantheism of the earlier Greek philosophers and sheer atheism. In general, however, we may affirm that the pantheism of the Eleatic school was penetrated by a religious sentiment, and tended to absorb the world into God, while that of the Ionic school was thoroughly materialistic, and tended to absorb God into the world, and differed from atheism rather in name than in fact. Zeno (B.C. 494), the distinguished Eleatic philosopher, maintained that there was but one real existence in the universe, and that all other things were merely phenomeiiial, being only modifications or appearances of the one substra- tum. AU was false and hollow that was based upon the
suggestions of sense. Thought and its object are iden- tical. Through his dialectical reasoning the school of the Sop/lints originated. I5y them it was denied that simple substance can till space ; next it was strip- ped gradually of every attribute, until it reached the vanishing point of the pantheistic perspective ; sub- stance, then, being wholly neutral and void of color, ceased to have any appreciable quality, and the schools of philosophy subsided into the blank atheism of Leu- cippus (B.C. 500) and Democritus (B.C. 460-357), whose atomic fatalism finds a close parallel in tlie Zabianism of the Babylonians, Phoenicians, with other idolatrous offsets of the Shemitic stock. The deepest questions that can occupy the human intellect were bandied to and fro in sophistical discussion ; all was problematical, all was doubt, and the only principle which met with universal acceptance was the sceptical maxim, p^ivaao dmarta'.