CHAPTER II.

PANTHEISTIC SPIRITUALISM.

WE enter not again upon any examination of Pantheism. Our object in this chapter is to inquire very briefly what hope may be reposed in the infidel spiritualism of the day, in the contest which all who believe in a spirit at all may unite in waging with the Positive Philosophy.

The literary atmosphere resounds at present with cries that remind us of what is lofty and eternal in the destiny of man. We hear of the eternities and the immensities, of the divine silences, of the destinies, of load-stars, still, though seen by few, in the heavens. We are well-nigh confounded, and, unless we have listened long, are at a loss to attach a meaning to the high-sounding but indefinite_terms. Meanwhile the compact phalanx under the black flag is steadily advancing. Can the spiritualistic pantheism which emanated or still emanates from Mr: Carlyle, oppose to it a line which will not easily be broken?

We must answer with an emphatic negative. We shall state briefly the leading reasons which prevail with us in so doing.

We assert of infidel spiritualism that it is rendered practically powerless by one great characteristic; the reverse of that which imparts strength to the positive array: it is hopelessly indefinite.

The British intellect imperatively demands clearness. We think we may venture now to hazard what is partly an assumption and partly a prediction, that the era of indefiniteness in metaphysics and religion is drawing to a close, and will ere long have been. A strange delusion seems to have possessed these latter years, that metaphysical truth, that discourse about the origin, nature, and destiny of man, was necessarily dim, obscure, unintelligible to ordinary minds. Presumptuous as it may seem in us, we must conceive it possible that, eighty or a hundred years hence, the spectacle of Coleridge and his gaping circle at Highgate will be regarded with an interest quite dissimilar from that which has hitherto attached to it. We fancy its interest will partake somewhat of ironical wonder. It will be taken as a sign of the singular decay and absence of metaphysical study in England. All that incomprehensibility in which the words of the great magician were wrapped, will be referred, partly to the want of intellectual power in the magician, and in still larger measure to absence of philosophical knowledge and metaphysical penetration in the audience. Men will have decided that the whole philosophy of Coleridge, had it arisen in Germany instead of England, would have been recognized, not as a wonderful phenomenon, worthy to be stared at and bowed down to by all men, but as a wing, with fittings of its own, of the general edifice of the philosophy of Schelling. In Germany, we imagine, it would have produced a few magazine articles, and perhaps a certain amount of disputation in the class-room of Schelling: in England it was enough to found an oracle. We are not sure that it will even seem presumptuous now to hazard this prediction. Clearness has again been vindicated for the language of metaphysics, a clearness equal to that of Hume or that of Berkeley: and the whole magnificent fabric of painted mist and moon

shine, which named itself the philosophy of Schelling, has been smitten as by keen lightnings, and may be said to have vanished from the intellectual horizon. This twofold result has been attained by one philosopher: Sir William Hamilton writes with the clearness and smites with the force of lightning. His advent on the philosophic stage we take to have marked the date at which the conclusion of the indefinite era became certain.

Now what definiteness do we find in the floating spiritualism of the day? We find, in looking toward Mr. Carlyle, that, though the Coleridgean distinction between reason and understanding may be shelved and laughed at, there is yet some esoteric region, removed altogether from that of logic, where truth is still secluded. We could have thanked Mr. Carlyle for his chapter on Coleridge, the cleverness of which is absolutely amazing, if he had clearly promulgated the doctrine, that there is more sense and straightforward manliness in going at once to the question, Is this true? than in raising endless debate as to how the truth is got at, and whether it is handed to us by reason or by understanding; if he had really exposed, as one of our latest hallucinations, the conception that truth was to be reached, not by the persistent and earnest use of the old time-tried faculties, but by cunningly evolving some new faculty, which, by its power to see, or its method of manipulating truth, would at length bring us into the light of knowledge. But we positively discover that Mr. Carlyle himself has some mysterious grove, into which, when hit by the sun-shafts of argument, he can retire; that plain logic and everyday reasoning will not suffice to combat any doctrine of his; that the only difference between him and Coleridge is, that the latter did name the new and superior faculty reason, nay, in his discourses on its nature and function, embodied a

large amount of truth, while Mr. Carlyle gives no name what ever to his Dodona grove, and demands belief without ever a verbal reason for its accordance. Looking, too, from the means by which truth is attained, to the truth arrived at, is not the indefiniteness still extreme? We say not that, save in one or two perplexing instances, the great author of whom we now speak ever writes without having a deep meaning in his words; but we now speak of the applicability of his teaching, and of that of his whole school, to the positive education of the race, to the practical opposition of atheism. And what a ghastly prospect opens before us! We put the question, What is the outlook for eternity? Amid much denunciation of doubt, we learn that we can not be assuredly answered, that a look into futurity is a look into a "great darkness." We ask, What is virtue, and how we are to perform the duties of our station? We are told that hero-worship is the all-embracing formula of duty, and that in its performance we attɛin unto the three reverences. When, at last, we are driven by the inappeasable demand of our souls to say, Who is the Lord, that we may serve Him? we are told that even once-honored Pantheism is but matter for a jest, and that all we can know of God is that He is inscrutable. A new proclamation of the worship of the Unknown God will hardly serve for the practical teaching of the world.

On this last sublime and solemn theme, we must be permitted to offer a remark. There may exist a spurious humility, and mock reverence, which will not honor God, and will defraud man of his highest glory. It does not honor God to make Him one with the Fate of Paganism, and virtually allege that His creatures can not or dare not draw near to Him: and if I can not in some way know my God, where is the distinction of my birthright from that of the beasts that perish?

Contemplating the universe in its vastness, all alit as it is with radiance, remembering that proximity is but relative, and that the particles of a sand-grain may to God appear no more in contact than the clustering galaxies whose distance we can not sum, it is in the power of the human mind, by an effort of abstraction, to figure it all as a bush, burning in the desert of immensity, to which the reasoning spirit, in hallowed awe, yet with a certain sublime confidence, may draw near to see its God. Let the shoes be from the feet, let no rash or irreverent approach be made, but let no human being shut his ear to the voice that calls to him as to the Hebrew prophet. I will not reject the highest attribute of my humanity, power to hear that voice; I will not go away, saying, the sight is too great for me, and indeed inscrutable. I will look because I am king of the earth, and I have my commission from Him who calls: I will look with silent reverence, because He is King of the universe.

We proceed to a second argument.

We need not claim the assent of the followers of Mr. Carlyle to the fact that religion must live in a man or nation, if he or it is to be strong: this truth has been fully acknowledged by the school. But we earnestly entreat both the strict adherents of Mr. Carlyle, and all those who look for individual and social regeneration in an abandonment of the forms of Christianity, and the pervasion of the atmosphere of the world by a certain lofty spiritual illumination, to consider one great historical fact, and one great human characteristic. The historical fact is, that a religion devoid of forms has never been the religion of a nation; the human characteristic is, that man will never bow down before a truth discovered, but only before one received on authority, that he will worship by faith and not by reason, a God not discovered but revealed.