Over against pantheism, in either of its phases, stands the view which I have called Deism. Deism lays so much stress on the difference, or, as it is here technically called, the transcendence, of the divine existence, that it removes God out of the world altogether, and sets him at a distance alike from the play of nature's laws and the thoughts and actions of mankind, — a spirit beyond the stars, a being who created the world once upon a time, who may interfere at times with the machinery, but who contents himself on the whole with "seeing it go." This view, though repudiated by religious feeling and by the more profound theological thinkers, is embedded in a great deal of popular theology and popular religion. And in more prosaic ages of thought it is sure to predominate, to the exclusion or neglect of the truth for which pantheism contends. The deistic God, an Être suprême or Great First Cause, is the kind of God whose existence the so-called "proofs of the existence of God" are intended to establish. People even speak in this connection of proving the existence of a God, a phrase which obviously implies that they think of God as an individual among other individuals, and therefore as a finite being within the universe in the widest sense of that

term. This is of course seen to be impossible, as soon as speculation rouses itself. Monotheism, conceived in this deistic fashion, is a survival of polytheistic belief, a higher development, no doubt, but not different in kind.

There is a certain amount of authority for the use of the term Theism to indicate a view which endeavors whether it succeeds or not is another question, but which at least endeavors to recognize both immanence and transcendence, and so to do justice to the truths which underlie the onesided extremes of pantheism and deism. The elements which must be combined in a theistic doctrine which shall satisfy both the head and the heart both the speculative and the practical reason can only be appreciated after some consideration of the contrasted extremes which it endeavors to mediate between, or, as the phrase runs, to combine in a higher unity.

The contrasts exhibit themselves to some extent on the stage of history, when we look at the course of modern philosophy. All historical generalizations of this kind require modification, when we look into the detailed history of the time; they are in the main simply suggestive points of view, and I am far from desiring to press unduly the view of the course of modern

speculation which I am about to propound, in face of the exceptions which any one so inclined might produce against it. Still, it is not uncommon in the best histories of philosophy to regard the seventeenth century as an age of universalism, followed in the eighteenth century by a swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme of individualism. Universalism, in this philosophic use of the term, implies a tendency to pantheism. Individualism means, in its first stage, deism, an individually separate first cause, as the originator of the finite individualities whose reality demands explanation. The difficulties which deism encounters in its search for such a God lead on this line of thought towards an atheistic culmination. The astronomer sweeps the heavens with his telescope and finds no God; reason finds it impossible to stop anywhere in the infinite regress of finite or phenomenal causes. The proposal to prove by the scientific law of causality the existence of an uncaused being seems, indeed, little better than a contradiction in terms. Hence the deistic God is at last discarded as a hypothesis which is not required.

Something like this development really took place in modern thought, if we look only at

its main currents. Seventeenth-century thought may be said, without injustice, to culminate in the great pantheistic system of Spinoza. This was what the Cartesian era issued in. And that this speculative strain is by no means to be attributed solely to the exceptional individuality of Spinoza, as a man and a thinker, is conclusively shown by the development of the same tendency independently by Malebranche, a Christian priest. Malebranche refers to Spinoza with virtuous indignation as a misérable, just as Locke, the individualist and deist, disclaims all kindred with his "justly decried" name, or as Hume, the individualistic sceptic, refers, with less excuse, to "that famous atheist" and his "hideous hypothesis" (Treatise, Bk. I. Part 4). Malebranche's system differs from Spinoza's, no doubt, in some not unessential points, where his Christian consciousness makes itself felt; and his intention is unquestionably theistic. But, in the main determinations of their systems, the Father of the Oratory and the excommunicated Jew coincide so closely that it is plain both are ⚫upborne by a common stream of tendency in the thought of the time.

Locke and Leibnitz were the minds who chiefly shaped the thought of the eighteenth century.

Leib

The activity of both carries us back some distance into the seventeenth, just as the shaping forces of the nineteenth begin to show themselves a good many years before 1800. nitz's system is a rehabilitation of the rights of the individual life against the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza. Leibnitz himself was too profoundly speculative a mind to find the last word of philosophy in a doctrine of bare Pluralism, that is, to accept a number of individual reals as absolutely self-subsistent and mutually independent. He endeavored to embrace them within the unity and harmony of a single system; and, in thus rendering justice to the truth which the universalistic systems emphasize, went so far sometimes in his expressions as to lay himself open to the imputation of Spinozism at the hands of his own degenerate successors, the prosaic and shallow philosophers of the Aufklärung, or Enlightenment. For it was the fate of the Leibnitzian philosophy, as it was developed in Germany, to be gradually stripped of its profounder elements. In being adapted for popular consumption, it was reduced to a cold and formal rationalism, in which the relation of God to the world became more and more external.