Reason and Redemption [pp. 409-437]

414 REASON AND REDEMPTION. [July,
There is something about this hoary and gigantic speculation
that is singularly imposing. It has always exercised a subtle
and predominating fascination over men illustrious for their
perspicacity and genius. The human mind, in its highest efforts
to construct a theory of the world unaided by the Scriptures,
bas found repose in this system. In its sway over the religious
feelings, though not as a finished and coherent philosophy, it is
peculiarly a system of the Orient. From a remote antiquity
the theosophic tenets of Buddhism have held in bondage the
populations of a vast section of the eastern hemisphere, and, as
is well known, the esoteric principles of Buddhism are essentially the same with those of Pantheism. So far as we are enabled to pronounce on a much-disputed question, the Nirv6na,
after which every Buddhist sighs, very closely resembles the
state in which the intellectual intuition of the German idealist has reached transcendental perfection. Upwards of a
thousand years before Christ, it is believed that the astute
Aryan intellect of India had anticipated the most startling deductions of Spinoza and Schelling. The only difference, as it
would appear, between the Brahmanic and the modern form
of Pantheism, is that according to the older opinion (to borrow
the favorite terms of Mr. Herbert Spencer), the period of
evolution was preceded and succeeded by long periods of equilibrium. In other words, the oriental pantheist regards the
period of evolution as finite, whereas the occidental pantheist
conceives of the period of evolution as infinite, and, therefore,
coe~ternal with God.*
As a strictly methodized system, however, we must go for the
beginnings as well as the highest developments of philosophy
to the Greeks. Albeit she got her philosophy, as her letters,
from the east, it is important to bear in mind that, in her metaphysics no less than in her literature, Greece was a profoundly
*Compare Dr. Hodge's Theology, vol. i, p. 312. It is curious to notice that
Mr. Spencer's own theory of the universe (which, in its logical tendencies, is appar
ently after all only a species of subtle realistic Pantheism) agrees more nearly as to
tbis last point with the Asiatic than with German Aristotalian type. See First Principles, p. 537, where, however, the author is merely indulging himself in a train of
purely speculative surmises as to the probable future of the material universe, and is
inclined to anticipate a process of eternal alternation between states of movement
and repose.