With Socrates (B. C. 468-399) opens a new epoch in Greek speculation. Hereafter we meet again with pantheistic notions, but they are no longer in extensive acceptance. The philosophers up to the days of Soc- rates had been simply physicists ; they looked on nat- ure or ^vaiQ as an entity in itself. The other or com- plementary truth of 1-eal or correct philosophy had to be discovered. It was dreamed of by Pythagoras, but first fully discerned by Socrates ; and we do not wonder that the wise said of him, " He first brought philosophy down from heaven to earth" — meaning that he was the first teacher who brought her down from airy abstrac- tions and generalizations about matter and its origin to questions of human interest : our duty here, our hopes hereafter. From this time, too, dates the distinction of the two branches in philosophy, science and ethics [see Philosophy] ; and henceforth the great problem of Greek philosophy, as of all philosophy, became, " What is the apx!] — the first principle— the ground and cause and reason of all existence?" The final answer of that age is found in Plato (q. v.), for "Platonism was the cul- mination, the ripened fruit of the ages of earnest thought which preceded Plato. He gathered up, co-ordinated, and grasped into unity the results bequeathed by the mental efforts of his predecessors. The Platonic an- swer to this great question of philosophy is clear and unequivocal. A perfect MIND is the primal source of aU being — a mind in which intellect, efficienc)', and goodness are one and identical" (Cocker, Theistic Con- ception, p. o8, od ; com p. also his Christianity and Greek Philosoph// ; Butler, Lectures on Ancient Philosophy/; Lewes, Biogr. Hist, of Philos.; and the references in the articles Plato and Platonism). One of the first of the Platonic disciples to advocate pantheistic views was Speusippus (f B.C. 339), Plato's sister's son, and the successor of Plato as scholarch (from 347 to 339). Speusippus pantheistically represents the Best or Di- vine as first indeed in rank, but as chronologically the last product of development, and he finds the principles of ethics in the happiness of a life conformed to nature (comp. Ueberweg, Hist, of Philos. i, 133, 134, and the lit- erature there quoted). Dicaearchus (B.C. 300), a disciple of Aristotle, and therefore a Peripatetic (q. v.), also ad- vocated pantheistic notions. He taught that " there exist no individual substantial souls, but only in their stead one universal, vital, and sensiti ve./brce, which is diffused through all existing organisms, and is tran- siently individualized in different bodies" (Ueberweg, i, 183)." The Stoics (founded B.C. 310) likewise taught this doctrine oi force. Plato and his predecessor Soc- rates had endeavored to reduce all being {esse) to unity, admitting only reason for a channel of knowledge. Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, but the founder of an independent school (known as the immanent in distinc- tion from the Platonic, which is known as the tran- scendent^, believing his senses as well as his reason, left the dualism of mind and matter unreconciled. With Plato God was one and all things; with Aristotle God was one, and the universe a distinct existence. But
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as nothing can be -which has not been before ; as there can be no addition to the totality of existence, Aris- totle made two eternals, the one Form, the other Mat- ter— God, and the material from which the universe was made. The Stoics were not satisfied with the du- ality. They felt with Plato that all must be one, that an infinite cannot leave a finite standing over against it. They were willing to trust the testimony of sense, and to admit that logically mind and matter, God and the world, are separate and distinct; yet the Stoics contended that actually they must be one. They there- fore made it their problem to show how God and the universe were distinct and yet one. Hence they came to teach that, " since the world contains parts endowed with self-consciousness, the world as a whole, which must be more perfect than any of its parts, cannot be unconscious: the consciousness which belongs to the universe is Deity. The latter permeates the world as an all-pervading breath, as artistically creative fire, as the soul and reason of the all, and contains the rational germs of all things" (\oyoi awLpixariKoi). Hence they conceive the human and even the divine spirit, not as immaterial intelligence (voix), but rather as a force embodied in the finest and highest material substances (comp. Ueberweg, i, 104, and the article Stoics). But bv far the most decided and the most spiritual repre- sentatives of the pantheistic philosophy among the Greeks were the so-called Alexandrian Neo-Plutonists (q. v.), in whom we see most clearly the influence of the East upon Greek thought. Tlie doctrines of em- anation, of ecstasy, expounded by Plotinus and Proclus, no less than the fantastic daimonism of lamblichus, point to Persia and India as their birthplace, and in fact differ from the mystic teaching of the Vedanta only by being presented in a more logical and intelligible form, and divested of the peculiar mythological allu- sions in which the philosophy of the latter is sometimes dressed up.
4. Early Christian Pantheism in the East. — In the Church of Christ also, in the various Gnostic sects, sub- ject to the same influences as the Neo-Platonists, we can plainly trace the same tendency as in the Neo- Platonists. This is especially true of those Gnostics who were monarchical, believing in one principle, i. e. who made God the universal idea, which includes the world, as the genus includes the species. They were the pure Gnostic Pantheists; such were Apelles (A.D. 188), Yalentinus (A.D. 140), Carpocrates (A.D. 120), and Epiphanes (A.D. 180). Those, however, who were du- alistic, making two eternal jmnciples, mind and matter, as did Saturninus (A.D. HI), Bardesanes (A.D. 152), and Basilides (A.D. 134), Avhose systems were borro\\ ed from Zoroaster and issued in Manichteism (q. v.), were scarcely pantheistic Gnostics. See Giiericke, Uandhuch der Kirchenr/esch. i, 195 sq.