RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Pantsenus Pantheism
this difficulty. The solution later attempted by the Stoics and Neoplatonists, that the harmony of the universe includes evil as the complement of good, just as the shadow goes with the light, may be traced in his doctrine of harmony, which, however, he does not apply to the ethical and intellectual declension of mankind. In fundamental agreement with the hylozoists was Diogenes of Apollonia, who set up his monism possibly in conscious opposition to the dualism of Anaxagoras. According to him the primal matter is air; this, which rules all things, he plainly calls God. It is omnipresent; not a thing exists which has no part in it, though all do not partake of it equally. Pantheism finds definite expression with the Stoics, who in the physical department followed Heraclitus in the main, asserting an organic or dynamic materialism in contrast with the mechanical materialism of Democritus and Epicurus. The primal matter, the Godhead or the divine fire, changes, in order to the creation of worlds, into air and water, and a part of the latter again into earth. In the process of creation and development fire and air are the more active elements, water and earth the passive — so that at times the Stoics almost seem to fall into the Platonic- Aristotelian antithesis of matter and form, i.e., into dualism; but this is really not the case. When, after Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism became extinct as a school, some of its teachings (as that of the rationes seminales, with which the lumen naturale is connected) had a continued existence in Christianity, and also exercised some influence on the development of philosophy. A connection may be traced with Toland, who in his Pantheisticon (1720) sketched a pantheistic religion of the future, with a cultus of truth, freedom, and sanity, and in his Letters to Serena (1704) taught a hylozoistic pantheism with many reminiscences of Stoicism. Matter is not inactive, but endowed with motion; thus there is no need of an external power to produce particular phenomena, nor of a soul as distinct from the body. The particular originated from the whole, and this whole is one, infinite, and rational. The law of nature, the soul of the world, is God, but not to be separated from the universe any more than the human soul from the human body.
In contrast with the form of pantheism hitherto considered, in which matter is living, in fact generally rational life, stands the form 3. Eleatic marked by a belief in rigid, lifeless Pantheism, matter, which first shows itself clearly in the Eleatic school. Xenophanes was the first Greek philosopher who decidedly and explicitly taught monotheism, rejecting all anthropomorphic conceptions of the Godhead, with which he identified the universe; according to Aristotle, " looking out upon the whole world, he said that the One was God." This Godhead exists absolutely without beginning, fills all space, and knows no motion or change. The formula hen kai pan ( One and All "), or more properly to pan hen (" All is One"), though often quoted as a characteristic expression of pantheism, is not so, strictly speaking, as it makes no mention of God; but that Xenophanes identified this All-One with the Godhead is expressly attested by Theophrastus. As
much can not be said of Parmenides, who insisted strongly on the unity of abstract being and denied the real existence of anything outside of it. Of hi3 All he predicates the following qualities: it is without beginning and indestructible; it is a whole, a unit, without motion and without end; it was not and will not be, but is continuously, always like itself and everywhere the same; being can not be attributed to any one part of it more than to another. It is thus evident that Parmenides' conception of being was material and limited, almost corporeal; that he was a monist or a materialist, though not perhaps in the usual sense, but hardly with strictness to be called a pantheist. And it is all the more remarkable that God is never mentioned in the extant fragments of his works, because he assuredly knew the poems of Xenophanes, his predecessor in the doctrine of the All-One, which are full of references to the Divinity. The same omission is noticeable in Melissus, the last of the Eleatic school; in both the Godhead is absolutely equivalent to that which is, so that it is possible to call them pantheists, laying due stress on the absence of the religious coloring which appears in the thought of Xenophanes. Owing to their fundamental belief in the immobility of the All, there was no room in the teaching of the Eleatics for development after it had received its definite shape with Parmenides. At most their belief in unity and immobility was capable of being carried out in an opposition to the knowledge of the world of phenomena, as with Plato, with whom, to be sure, the unity was forced soon to resolve itself into plurality. Nor could it logically lead to any ethical teaching, since the individual was incapable of assuming a position apart from the All, such as would be necessary to any moral action. The teaching of the Megarian school, undoubtedly based on that of the Eleatic, can not be regarded as a further development of it, but is marked by a mere change, under the influence of the Socratic ethics, in the designation of the One, which Euclid called " the Good," " intelligence," " God," " reason."
There is a certain resemblance between the Eleatic philosophy and the monism of Spinoza, with whom substance is the only thing that really exists. It can thus only be one, and may be
designated equally well as God or 4. Spinoza, nature. Since everything is either
extended and external or spiritual and internal, these are the two forms in which the eternal Being comes to our consciousness. Theoretically there are endless attributes of substance or God, from the postulate of infinity; but extension and thought are the only ones cognizable. Thus is set aside the dualism of Descartes, who assumed the existence of two distinct substances in the world of phenomena, the extended and the thinking, and placed above them God as the creator. Particular things were for Spinoza only forms or modes of these attributes. Each mode is such in both attributes at once; thus man on his bodily side is a mode of extension, on his mental a mode of thought. The strictly mathematical and eternal deduction of all things from God does not, indeed, explain actuality. This is the great difficulty of most metaphya-
Pantheism