Sentence Examples:
Carlyle remained a Puritan, without any dogmatic beliefs except a kind of moralistic pantheism.
His resort to earth as a material first principle was but another guess or disguised theosophy added to those of his predecessors, and has no philosophic congruity with his pantheism.
By whatever polysyllabic name the more consciously speculative poets designate their philosophical creed, this belief in the infinite meaning of every object in the physical world is pure pantheism, and the instinctive poetical religion is inevitably a pantheistic one.
Equally, the attempts which are logically possible at metaphysical solutions of the problem, namely, theism, pantheism, and atheism, if they are consistently carried out, assert, each of them, more than we know and are involved in contradiction with themselves.
Scripture promises us the resurrection of a glorified body, and indeed a separate existence without limitation in space is unthinkable; yet it may be that this promise implies nothing more than the continued existence of the individual, as opposed to pantheism.
The attempts to show that ancient Egyptian religion was a sublime monotheism, or an enlightened pantheism which disguised itself in allegories and metaphors, have their origin in a confusion between the aspirations of individual thinkers and the actual religion of their time.
In the Stoic distinctions of personality and world, of I and mine, of subjective consciousness and the world of objects, of freedom and dependence, we find implicit the basic elements of modern philosophies of rationalism and of objective idealism or pantheism.
The speculative theologians and philosophers of modern times, on the contrary, foist in all sorts of pantheistic definitions, although they deny the principle of pantheism; and the result of this process is simply an absolutely self-contradictory, insupportable fabrication of their own.
With the disintegration of the solid orthodoxies Wordsworth became for many intelligent, liberal-minded families the Bible of that sort of pantheism, that dim faith in the existence of a spiritual world, which filled, somewhat inadequately, the place of the older dogmas.
Emerson is never concerned to defend himself against the charge of pantheism, or the warning to beware lest he unsettle the foundations of morality, annihilate the freedom of the will, abolish the distinction between right and wrong, and reduce personality to a mask.
It is the religion of nature, the simple faith of the patriarchs of old, the belief that finds its strongest support in a noble pantheism, in the love of the Creator's handiwork, in a perception of the Omnipotent in the marvelous grandeur of material beauty.
Then the whole superstructure of Pantheism falls along with the Idealism on which it depends; and it is found to be, not a solid and enduring system of truth, but a frail edifice, ingeniously constructed out of the mere abstractions of the human mind.
On the other hand, whenever religion travels too far afield from its emotional and primal base in the cult of the nearer dead, it must either be constantly renewed by fresh and familiar objects of worship, or it tends to dissipate itself into mere vague pantheism.
For it is not hard to show that theism is better adapted to man's higher needs, than atheism or polytheism or pantheism; while if theism be once granted, then, as we said in the last section, the argument from adaptability is much more easily established.
Pantheism reduces all existence to an absolute unity; multiplicity either has no real existence, or is limited to phenomena, which, in the judgment of some followers of this system, contain no reality of any sort, and, in the opinion of all pantheists, can contain no substantial reality.
There is indeed a certain intoxication in the very sense of being submerged in a large whole, a certain glad loss of self in great impersonal movements, a certain strain of democratic pantheism, as it were, that takes the place with some of mystic absorption in Deity.
He warned his readers against that sort of intoxication of the understanding, when the imagination is suffered to run wild in allegorical interpretations of Scripture, in fanciful allusions, in theories of mystic influences and properties which carry away the mind into wild superstitions and Pagan pantheism.
We have here taken the olden heathenism in a very simple light, and quite generally as a materialism assuming a poetic form and expression, but one, at the same time, in which, as soon as we pierce through its poetical investiture, we discern many points of contact with Pantheism.
After the strongest amount of historical evidence has been adduced, and after all alleged difficulties have been answered, he simply falls back on his atheism or his pantheism, which assumes that all supernatural occurrences must be impossible, and therefore that alleged instances of them are delusions.
In its inmost essence it is akin to the old Greek conception of nature, and antagonistic to all the official creeds of modern days; it is vitally impregnated with the pantheism which reappears in this century as the dominating element in the feeling for nature in every literature.
If the one tends towards atheism, or to a deism in which the world is viewed as a machine; the other tends towards pantheism or to naturalism, wherein no opportunity for interposition by miraculous revelation is retained, but the inner consciousness of man is regarded as able to create a religion.
And so now, when the darkness of evolutionism and pantheism is most dense, a light from above has illuminated the record in the book of nature, the language of which is already more familiar to our modern world than the language of the book so long distrusted and almost derided.
I do not examine philosophical systems too minutely, lest I should be drawn into hurling at them such words as pantheism, mysticism, positivism, materialism, naturalism, without being quite clear when it is no longer lawful to express myself in these terms; epithets and labels are very apt to return home to roost.
These systems, as absurd as they are fatal, although under distinct forms, and by various means, they tend to prepare the way for pantheism, contain a profound truth which, disfigured by vain cavils, seems to be an abyss of darkness, whereas it is in itself a ray of most brilliant light.
In this pantheism penitents and hermits were esteemed as above kings and heroes; but even the life of a hermit was not exacting enough for them, so they organized the idea of a soul of the universe so incomprehensible that, as they themselves acknowledged, no man could comprehend it or instruct another in it.
There was no philosophical doctrine of which he had such terror and against which he so frequently waged war as that of pantheism; and perhaps this polemical preoccupation is the only trace, though quite an involuntary trace, visible in his writings of the tendency which he must have observed in himself.
He holds, in effect, that all religions take their rise in the desire to explain the world; and that, in regard to truth and error, they differ, in the main, not by preaching monotheism polytheism or pantheism, but in so far as they recognize pessimism or optimism as the true description of life.
The brood of Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while avoiding the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the sophistic acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last irreconcilable enemy of philosophy and morality alike.
It were better to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen and the crowd, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence of so catastrophic a claim.
I beg leave, therefore, to repeat, and to carry on my former position, that the religion of Egypt, at the time of the Exodus of the Hebrews, was a pantheism, on the point of passing into that polytheism, of which it afterwards afforded a specimen, gross and distasteful even to polytheists themselves of other nations.
In philosophy, the fact that the same difficulties occur in natural religion as well as in revealed, would now throw them back from monotheism into atheism or pantheism; while the mysteries of revelation, which by a rough criticism were then denied, would be now conceded and explained away as psychological peculiarities of races or individuals.
They were similar to those of Hesiod and others in their main lines, but they owe their importance for us now to the fact that they exhibit a pantheism which is opposed to the common polytheistic theology of the time; they endeavor to show that deity is one and universal under whatever form or appearance.
The influence of Wordsworth upon him was immense, but he was enabled, by the order of his mind, to reject with the heartiest goodwill the cloudy pantheism which robs so much of Wordsworth's best verse of the heightened charm of reality, for, after all, poetry, like religion, must be true, or it is nothing.
I can come to no conclusion, accordingly, but that Pantheism really only differs from atheism, in so far as it confesses that it is impossible to speak with ordinary propriety, or in any such way as to meet the necessities either of science itself or of the common sense and feelings of mankind, without employing theistic language.
Their religion seems to the superficial investigator to be but an exceptionally pure form of pantheism, but this is not, in fact, the case, since philologists to-day recognize that the overwhelming spontaneous impulse which forces the barbaric human mentality to give utterance to its deepest emotions, is a certain index of a crude monotheistic conception.
The mystical theology, which, from seeking the illuminating influence and piercing love of the Deity, often proceeded onward to visions of complete absorption in his essence, till that itself was lost, as in the east, from which this system sprung, in an annihilating pantheism, had never wanted, and can never want, its disciples.
And the champion of pantheism as well as the electric theory affirms: "Since we are all bound together in one common enterprise in which progress is hastened through the harmony of its parts, altruism becomes profound wisdom, selfishness a mark of ignorance, and the highest codes of ethics are the most scientific expression of nature's laws."
Even when perfectly ordinary subjects from modern life are in question the basis of this art is, as in the first half of the century, by no means the sense for what is purely pictorial, by no means that naturalistic pantheism which inspires the modern French, but rather a sense for what is moral or ethical.
The unhappiness of the Roman world lay in its abstraction from that in which man had hitherto found his satisfaction; this satisfaction arose out of that pantheism, in which man found his highest truth in natural things, such as air and fire and water, and further in his duties, in the political life of the State.
Notwithstanding all these great and far-reaching moral faults, heathenism, in the days of its bloom and power, at least in those departments of the moral life, such as politics and municipal matters, in which pantheism and polytheism did not exert their relaxing influence, had still preserved much high moral earnestness and an astonishing energy.
Be it pantheism, or whatever any one else may choose to call it, we entertain the very simple belief that the ultimate laws of nature, impressed upon the material world, are nothing less than the direct power of the Almighty upholding the universe, and controlling all its operations throughout all time from the origin of the creation to its end, if it shall have one.
It discusses many of the leading religious questions of the day in a racy and pointed style, and while opposing what the author deems the errors of Protestantism in general, reserves its hottest fire for modern Pantheism, Socialism, Rationalism, and other kindred innovations, which he regards as gaseous exhalations from the bottomless pit, taking a visible form in these latter days.
His pantheism appears in the declaration that the All is thought and intelligence; and this, indeed, constitutes the essential feature of his doctrine, for, by thus placing thought and being in parallelism with each other, and interconnecting them by the conception that it is for the sake of being that thought exists, he showed that they must necessarily be conceived of as one.
This is the only legitimate haven of a theory of development: sending back the tide of materialism and pantheism which has swept its mire over our age into the ebb again; as, after having reached the full, it has so often done already, before the constitutional instincts or inspirations of humanity, with which speculative minds may, indeed, dally for a generation but which are ultimately inexorable.
This is the kind of man who writes sentimental novels, with a good deal of love laced with a vague form of pantheism or of weak evangelical religion, to suit all tastes; or he is great in a certain kind of indefinite poetry which no one has yet been found to understand, save perhaps, a special Soul Sister, which is the subdued version among us of the more suggestive Spiritual Wife.
Against the background of a materialistic pantheism, in which Stoic speculation culminated, two positive interests stood out: one, the resolute and truly human courage with which the Stoic faced the reality as he conceived it, and kept his dignity and his conscience pure, although heaven might fall; the other, the efforts he made, in his need for religion, to rejuvenate and reinterpret the pagan forms.
Between both extremes, it holds an intermediate position, neither aspiring, with Pantheism, to solve the problems of the Absolute, nor neglecting them, with Positivism, as altogether remote from the field of philosophical inquiry; but maintaining that such problems must necessarily arise, and must necessarily be taken into account in every adequate survey of human nature and human thought, and that philosophy, if it cannot solve them, is bound to show why they are insoluble.