the Arab possessed was elicited by contact with Spanish or Oriental Christianity.

But, fourthly, Monotheism provides morality with a strong and stable foothold. Mohammedan and Calvinistic monotheism divest man of responsibility; but Jewish monotheism is free from this vice. What is necessary for the conservation of society, is a code of easily intelligible laws of morality, applicable to everyday life, and based on irrefragable authority. This code can be obtained in two ways, either by revelation or by induction from accurate observation. It must be enforced either by state authority or by divine authority.

A man of thought will not steal because he knows that he is violating a law of sociology; it matters nothing to him whether that law reaches him directly by a revelation, or indirectly by study of the science of social economy, for the law is written by the same hand, in one case on stone tables, in the other on the fleshy tables of the heart. He will not indulge in sensuality, because he knows that by so doing he will be using up and wasting that vital force, limited in amount, which may be directed to the evolution of brain. But the vast majority of men care nothing for the principles which govern philosophers, and the only law they will recognise is one direct from God. The law governing the sage is every whit as truly a law of God, but it is reached through an analysis of statistics. This the ordinary man of the world objects to; the statistics are not complete, the analysis is faulty; contingent circumstances have not been taken into account, which would modify or alter the law, or at least weaken its cogency. But a revealed law is plain and straightforward, and to that he will acquiesce-through idleness, maybe, but more generally through mistrust of the other.

It is also in vain to attempt to base a system of ethics upon pantheism. Pantheism may be found sufficient to supply a faith adequate to the awakening of wonder and love of the beauty and mystery of nature, but not to the practical consecration of life; it is impossible to persuade men-the bulk of men-to feel responsibility to hypostatized laws that neither know nor can speak to them. The verities of nature and the designs of nature are words, and nothing more, when brought to bear on morals. When their gloss is gone, no residuum of duty remains. "In his crimes," says a writer in the Westminster Review, with exquisite beauty and truth, "it is not the heavy irons of his prison, but the deep eye of his Judge, from which he shrinks; and in his repentance he weeps, not upon the lap of nature, but at the feet of God."1

1 New Series, vol. ii. (1852), p. 183.

CHAPTER XIV

PANTHEISM

Theories to account for the existence of the world-The atomic theoryThe evolutive theory-The dualistic theory-The theory of Pyrrhonic idealism The theory of Hegelian idealism-The theistic theory of creation-The phusitheistic theory of emanence and immanence.

THE world either exists, or it appears to exist.

If we suppose that our senses convey to us true impressions, we must hold that the world has being.

On the supposition that the world has a positive existence and is not a mere phantasm, the questions arise, For what purpose, and, By what means does it exist?

The first of these questions we shall dismiss from consideration; it has been hotly debated over, but it has not formed the basis of religious teaching. The second question has given rise to religious and philosophic cosmogonies, which are endeavours more or less successful. Among all these hypotheses which we shall review in order, some are no longer tenable, but they have had their day; and as the scoria of speculative eruptions in past ages, they had an interest in our own.1

The first hypothesis is that the world is eternal, uncreate, and self-existent; that it is a fortuitous aggregation of as many different substances as there are different existences;

1 Essai sur la Philosophie, par Labruguière; Paris, 1862.

that these are held together in a certain order by physical affinities, inherent in their nature. Matter being from everlasting, the properties being fortuitous, and the arrangement of matter being accidental, there is, and can be, no God, for there is no purpose, no cause. "The solar system has a sun and numerous planets; they are all distributed in a certain ratio of distance; they move round the sun with a certain velocity, always exactly proportionate to their distance from the sun: this holds good with regard to the nearest and the farthest. They move in paths of the same form; they are ruled by the same laws of motion; they receive and emit light in the same way. The laws, which are the constant modes of planetary operation, when we come to study them are found to be exceedingly intricate; yet they are uniform, and the same for one planet as for another; the same for a satellite as for a planet. They are perfectly kept, and so uniform in action that if you go back to the time of Thales, five hundred years before Christ, you can calculate the eclipse of the moon, and find that it took place exactly as the historians of that day relate; or you may go forward five days, or five years, or five thousand years, and calculate with the same precision. So accurate are these laws, that an astronomer studying the perturbations of a remote planet, the phenomena of its economy not accounted for by the attraction of bodies known to be in existence, conjectures the existence of some other planet which causes the phenomena not accounted for. Nay, by mathematical science he determines its place and size, inferring the fact of a new planet outside of the uttermost ring of the solar system; at a certain minute he turns his telescope to the calculated spot, and, for the first time, the star of Leverrier springs before the eye of conscious man."1

1 Parker: Works, vol. xi. p. 7.

This manifest order and perfection in the universe the atheist sets himself to account for thus.

True is it that as far as we know everything seems inimitably ordered, but that proves nothing but that we know of no other ordering. A disturbance of the present economy of nature would throw matter into an entirely different arrangement, and to those who did not know that with which we are acquainted the new system would seem perfect. Men suppose the world to be a machine, and then they require a constructor; they say a bird lifts or depresses its tail to regulate its flight, therefore the tail has been contrived for the purpose of facilitating the motions of the bird in the air. But this is begging the question. The bird employs its tail because it happens to have one. Man not being thus endowed, does not think a tail could advantage him. A bird can do no otherwise than fly; fly it must, because flight exhausts its power and expresses its nature, not because it was created for the purpose of flying. A bird uses its wings and tail as a man uses a gun. A quadruped does not fly, because it has not the means of flying; it runs or leaps, precisely as a savage, not having firearms, makes the best use he can of bow and arrows.

Atheism, whether true or false, is repugnant to moral and political economy, for it necessarily destroys the idea of morality. If there is no law in the material physical world, there can be none in the social and the spiritual worlds. The desire of obtaining intense and permanent happiness, which is the motive force in ethics, is a delusion; every motive for self-restraint is removed, for the idea of an object for which to strive is rejected, and the notion of a retributive justice is derided.

According to the second hypothesis, the world is held to