PANTHEISM (Gr. pan, all, and Oleos, God), the name given to that system of specula tions which in its spiritual form, identifies the universe with God (akosutism), and, in its more material form, Goil with the universe. It is only the latter kiwi of pantheism that is logically open to the accusation of atheism (q.v.); the former has often been the expression of a profound religiosity. The antiquity of pantheism is undoubtedly great, for it is prevalent in the oldest known civilization in the world—the Hindu. Yet it is a later development of thought than polytheism (q.v.), the natural instinctive creed of primitive races, and most probably originated in the attempt to divest the popular system of its grosser features, and to give it a form that would satisfy the requirements of philosophical speculation. Hindu pantheism, as alcosmiwt, is taught, especially by the Upanishads (q.v.), the Vedanta (q.v.), and Yoga (q.v.) philosophies, and by those poet ical works which embody the doctrines of these systems; for instance, the Bliagavaglia, which follows the Yoga doctrine. It is poetical and religious, rather than scientific, at least in its phraseology; but it is substantially similar to the more logical forum devel oped in Europe. The Hindu thinker regards man as born into a world of illusions and entanglements, from which his great aim should be to deliver himself. Neither sense, nor reason, however, is capable of helphig him; only through long-coutinued, rigorous, and holy contemplation of the supreme unity (Brahma) can lie become emancipated from the deceptive influence of phenomena, and fit to apprehend that he and they are alike but evanescent modes of existence assumed by that infinite, eternal, and unchange able spirit who is all in all. Hindu pantheism is thus purely spiritual in its character; matter and (finite) mind are both alike absorbed in the fathomless abyss of illimitable and absolute being: Greek pantheism, though it doubtless originated in the same way as that of India, is at once more varied in its form, and more ratiocinative in its method of exposition. The philosophy of Anaximander (q.v.), the Milesian, may almost, with equal accuracy, be described as a system of atheistic physics or of materialistic pantheism. Its leading idea
is, that from the infinite or indeterminate (to apeiron), which is "one yet all," proceed the entire phenomena of the universe, and to it they return. Xenophanes (q.v.), how ever, the founder of the Eleatic school, and author of the famous metaphysical mot, nihilo, nihil fit, is the first classical thinker who promulgated the higher or idealistic form of pantheism. Denying the possibility of creation, he argued that there exists only an eternal, infinite one or all, of which individual objects and existences are merely illusory modes of representation; but as Aristotle finely expresses it—and it is this last conception which gives to the pantheism of Xenophanes its distinctive character—" casting his eyes wistfully upon the whole heaven, lie pronounced that unity to be God." Heracleitus (q.v.), who flourished a century later, reverted to the material pantheism of the Ionic school, and appears to have held that the "all " first arrives at consciousness in man, whereas Xenophanes attributed to the same universal entity, intelligence, and self existence, denying it only personality. But it is often extremely difficult, if not impossi ble, to draw or to see the distinction between the pantheism of the earlier Greek philoso phers and sheer atheism. In general, howeVer, we may affirm that the pantheism of the Eleatic school was penetrated by a religious sentiment, and tended to absorb the world in God, while that of the Ionic school was thoroughly materialistic, tended to absorb God in the world, and differed from atheism rather in name than in fact. But the most decided and the most spiritual representatives of this philosophy. among the Greeks were the so-called " Alexanorian" Yeoplatonists (q v.), in whom we see clearly, for the first time, the influence of the east upon Greek thought. The doctrines of emanation, of ecstasy, expounded by Plotinus (q.v.). and Proclus (q.v.), no less than the fantastic Demonism of Iamblichus (q.v.) point to Persia and India as their birthplace, and in fact differ from the mystic teaching of the Vedanta only by being presented in a more logical and intelligible form, and divested of the peculiar mythological allusions in which the philosophy of the latter is sometimes dressed up.