principle of life, determining and mastering matter. Thus, the body is nothing of itself; it is what it is, only through the soul, the nature and being of which it expresses, to which it stands in the relation of a medium in which the object, the soul, is reahzed ; and so it cannot be imagined without the body, nor the body with- out it ; one must be produced contemporaneously with the other." ^ Of course there can be no immortality of the soul. As no plant is immortal, as the vital principle does not exist separately from the plant, so the soul has no existence separate from the body. The two begin and end together. " The really human in the soul, that which has come into being, must also pass away, the understand- ing even ; only the divine reason is immortal ; but, as the memory belongs to the sensitive soul, and individual thought depends on the understanding or passive nous only, all self-consciousness must cease with death." ^ " Thus, then, Aristotle's doctrine of the soul shows that his defect, as well as that of Plato, and indeed of all antiquity, was his imperfect acquaintance with the idea of person- ality ; and on that head he cannot be acquitted of a pantheistic ten- dency." ^ " His God is not a really personal one, or is only an imperfect personality." * " The nous^ or reason, allows souls, with their bodies, to sink back into nothingness, from which they sev- erally issued. It alone exists on, ever the same and unalterable ; for it is no other than the divine nous in individual existence, the divine intelligence enlightening the night of human understanding, and must be conceived just as much the prime mover of human discursive thought and knowledge, as of his will." ^
This brief review of the Grecian philosophy in its relation to theology, shows that in all its forms it was more or less pantheistic. This remark will not be i-ecognized as correct by those, who with Cousin, limit the use of the word Pantheism to designate either the doctrine which makes the material universe God ; or that which denies the existence of anything but matter and physical force, which is atheism ; nor by those who take the word strictly as meaning the theory which admits of only one substance, which is the substance of God ; and which consequently makes matter as much a mode of God's existence as mind. Its correctness, how- ever, will be admitted by those who mean by Pantheism the doc- trine which makes all the intelligence in the world the intelligence of God, and all intellectual activity modes of the activity of God, and which necessarily precludes the possibility of human liberty and responsibility.
1 The Gentile and the Jeio, p. 338. - Jbid. p. 339. « Ibid. p. 340.
* Ibid. p. 336. 5 Ibid. p. 339.
328 PART I. — THEOLOGY. [Ch. m. - Anti-Theism.
The authorities on this subject are, so far as Plato and Aristotle are concerned, of course their own writings ; with regard to those philosophers whose works are not preserved, or of which only fragments are extant, their systems are more or less fully detailed by the ancient writers, as Plutarch and Cicero. The general reader will find the information he needs in one or more of the numerous histories of philosophy ; as those of Brucker, Ritter, Tenneraan, and Cousin ; among the latest and best of which is Bollinger's " The Gentile and the Jew in the Courts of the Tem- ple of Christ," London, 1862.
D. Mediaeval Pantheism.
The Neo-Platonists. Pantheism, as it appeared in the Middle Ages, took its form and character from Neo-Platonism. This was an eclectic system in which the Eleatic doctrine of the unity of all being was combined with the Platonic doctrine concerning the phenomenal universe. The philosophers recognized as the representatives of this school are Plotinus (a. d. 205-270), Porphyry (born a. d. 233), Jambli- chus in the fourth century, and Proclus in the fifth. Neo-Pla- tonism was monism. It admitted of only one universal Being. This Beino- considered in itself was inconceivable and indescriba- ble. It was revealed, or self-manifested in the world-soul, and world-i-eason, which constituted a trinity ; one substance in dif- ferent aspects or modes of manifestation. The world is therefore " the affluence of God," as fire emits heat. . The soul of man is a mode of God's existence, a portion of his substance. Its destiny is absorption in the infinite Being. This was not to be attained by thought, or by meditation, but by ecstasy. This constituted the peculiar feature of the Neo-Platonic school. " Union with God " was to be attained by " a mystical self-destruction of the individual person (Ichheit) " in God.^ Schwegler ^ says : " From the intro- duction of Christianity monism has been the character and the fundamental tendency of the whole modei'n philosophy." This re- mark, coming from an advocate of that theory, must be taken with no small amount of allowance. It is, however, true that almost all the great departures from the simplicity of the truth as revealed in the sacred Scriptures, have assumed more or less distinctly a pan- theistic tendency.
1 History of Philosoj)hy. Translated from the German by Julius H. Seelye, p. 157. 3 Ibid. p. 158.