God the Known and God the Unknown | Page 8

sole energy
governs all things; all things are unity, and each portion is All; for of
one integer all things were born; in the end of time all things shall again
become unity; the unity of multiplicity.' Orpheus, his disciple, taught
no other doctrine."
According to Pythagoras, "an adept in the Orphic philosophy," "the
soul of the world is the Divine energy which interpenetrates every
portion of the mass, and the soul of man is an efflux of that energy. The
world, too, is an exact impress of the Eternal Idea, which is the mind of
God." John Scotus Erigena taught that "all is God and God is all."
William of Champeaux, again, two hundred years later, maintained that
"all individuality is one in substance, and varies only in its
non-essential accidents and transient properties." Amalric of Bena and
David of Dinant followed the theory out "into a thoroughgoing
Pantheism." Amalric held that "All is God and God is all. The Creator
and the creature are one Being. Ideas are at once creative and created,
subjective and objective. God is the end of all, and all return to Him.
As every variety of humanity forms one manhood, so the world
contains individual forms of one eternal essence." David of Dinant only

varied upon this by "imagining a corporeal unity. Although body, soul,
and eternal substance are three, these three are one and the same
being."
Giordano Bruno maintained the world of sense to be "a vast animal
having the Deity for its living. soul." The inanimate part of the world is
thus excluded from participation in the Deity, and a conception that our
minds can embrace is offered us instead of one which they cannot
entertain, except as in a dream, incoherently. But without such a view
of evolution as was prevalent at the beginning of this century, it was
impossible to see "the world of sense" intelligently, as forming "a vast
animal." Unless, therefore, Giordano Bruno held the opinions of Buffon,
Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with more definiteness than I am
yet aware of his having done, his contention must be considered as a
splendid prophecy, but as little more than a prophecy. He continues,
"Birth is expansion from the one centre of Life; life is its continuance,
and death is the necessary return of the ray to the centre of light." This
begins finely, but ends mystically. I have not, however, compared the
English translation with the original, and must reserve a fuller
examination of Giordano Bruno's teaching for another opportunity.
Spinoza disbelieved in the world rather than in God. He was an
Acosmist, to use Jacobi's expression, rather than an Atheist. According
to him, "the Deity and the Universe are but one substance, at the same
time both spirit and matter, thought and extension, which are the only
known attributes of the Deity."
My readers will, I think, agree with me that there is very little of the
above which conveys ideas with the fluency and comfort which
accompany good words. Words are like servants: it is not enough that
we should have them-we must have the most able and willing that we
can find, and at the smallest wages that will content them. Having got
them we must make the best and not the worst of them. Surely, in the
greater part of what has been quoted above, the words are barren letters
only: they do not quicken within us and enable us to conceive a thought,
such as we can in our turn impress upon dead matter, and mould [sic]
that matter into another shape than its own, through the thought which

has become alive within us. No offspring of ideas has followed upon
them, or, if any at all, yet in such unwonted shape, and with such want
of alacrity, that we loathe them as malformations and miscarriages of
our minds. Granted that if we examine them closely we shall at length
find them to embody a little germ of truth-that is to say, of coherency
with our other ideas; but there is too little truth in proportion to the
trouble necessary to get at it. We can get more truth, that is to say, more
coherency-for truth and coherency are one-for less trouble in other
ways.
But it may be urged that the beginnings of all tasks are difficult and
unremunerative, and that later developments of Pantheism may be more
intelligible than the earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not the case. On
continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a hundredfold
more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling, Fichte,
and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed into a
hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we doubt
whether they understand themselves, and feel that