It is at the Tubingen University ])rineipally that pantheism has obtained its favorable exponents and lieartiest advocates. 'I'lie boldest and most reckless of pantlicistic divines is undoubtedly Dr. David Friedrich Strauss (q. v.), who represents the left wing of the He- gelian system, as applied to theology. A personal God and a historical Christianity are alike rejected, and the entire doctrines of the Bible arc treated as a congeries of mythological ideas. The worship of liuman genius is reaimmended as the only real divinity. With Hegel, Strauss believes God to have no separate individual ex- istence ("Ohne Welt is Gott niclit Gott"), but to be a process of thought gradually unfolding itself in the mind of the philosopher. Clirist also lie regards as simply the embodied conceptions of the Churcli. The thought of the personalitj' of Christ is "a purposeless residuum." Humanity is the anointed of the L()rd. The incarna- tion means, not the union of two natures in one personal subsistence, but union through the spirit of the absolute and the finite; the Deity thinking and acting in uni-
versal humanity. The resurrection and ascension — the corner-stones of the Christian building — are a mere rep- resentation of human progress by a double negation; the negative of all that is worth the name of life, fol- lowed by a resolution of that negative condition through quickened union with the Absolute. Thus there is no room for faith or trust, no sense of individual support, no hope of answered prayer, in this soulless and hope- less system. The " sting of ignorance" is ignorance of Straussian and Hegelian ideas; its removal is the only "resurrection to life." Such extreme infidelity as this is scarcely exceeded by that of Feuerbach, who pro- nounces religion a dream of the human fancy. It is the extreme point to which pantheism has been carried in Germany, and at this point it becomes nearly, if not completely, identical with atheism.
There arose, also, after the French Revolution of 1830, a school of light literature which went by the name of Young Germany, and which, combining Ger- man pantheism with French wit and frivolity, had as its avowed object, by means of poems, novels, and critical essays, to destroy the Christian religion. This school, headed by Heine, Borne, and others, substituted for the Bible doctrine that man was created in the im- age of God, the blasphemous notion that God is no more than the image of man. The literary productions, how- ever, of this class of infidel wits were more suited to the atmosphere of Paris than that of Berlin, and accordingly some of the ablest writers of the school left Germany for France, and Young Germany, having lost its pres- tige, was speedily forgotten. In more recent literature the pantheistic notions abound again, but not in such an objectionable shape. One of the ablest modern advo- cates of Spinozaism is the weU-known German novelist, Berthold Aueiliaih, like his master in philosophy, of the Jewish profession, and, like him, a man of the high- est moral life. While it must be conceded that Au- erbach has purified and ennobled the infidel notions of the German masses, he yet has failed to quicken them spiritually, and there is only, as heretofore, a religion enthroned in the reason. See Rationalism.
The pantheistic system is too abstract and specula- tive in its character to find acceptance with the F'rench mind generally. Near the beginning of the last cen- tury, however, Denis Diderot (1713-84), one of the En- cyclopffidists (q. v.), passed from theism and faith in revelation to pantheism, which recognises God in natu- ral law, and in truth, beauty, and goodness. By the conception of sensation as immanent in all matter, he at once reached and outran the final consequence of materialism. In the place of the monads of Leibnitz, Diderot put atoms, in which sensations were bound up. The sensations became conscious in the animal organ- ism. Out of sensations grows thought. He sought to construct a system that should supersede the Christian, but in the attempt he was led away into utter darkness, and became the most heartless of atheists. See the ar- ticle Diderot. The prevailing philosophy of France, in our day, is deeply imbued with pantheism. It is to be attributed to Victor Cousin (1792-18G7), the founder of the modern eclectic school of France. He declares (iod to be "absolute cause, one and many, eternity and time, essence and life, end and middle, at the summit of existence and at its base, infinite and finite together; in a word, a trinity, being at the same time (iod and Humanity." In what words could pantheism be more plainly set forth than in those just quoted ? Yet Cou- sin anxiously repels the charge of pantheism, simply because he does not hold with Spinoza and the Elcatics that God is a pure substance, and not a cause. Pan- theism, however, as we have seen, a.ssumes a variety of phases, and though Cousin may not, with Spinoza, iden- tify God with the abstract idea of substance, he teaches the same doctrine in another form when he declares the finite to be comprehended in the infinite, and the uni- verse to be comprehended in God. (See IMorell, Hist, of Philosophy, ii, 478 sq. ; Farrar, Critical History of Free
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Thought, p. 297 sq. ; Princeton Review, April, 185G, art. viii.)