Pantheism and Christianity

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... principle with the independent ground, is the highest personality. And since the living unity of both is spirit, then is God, as the absolute bond, spirit in an eminent and absolute sense. We have followed Schwegler's five divisions of Schelling's philosophy, but in reality the five may be reduced to two--that in which Schelling agrees with Spinoza, and that in which he follows Bohme. He repudiated the epithet 'Pantheistic, ' and strongly expressed his belief, in the personality of God. But whether Spinoza or Bohme was the more Pantheistic, or which of them most believed in the divine personality, is 'among the things which we desire to know.' 'The God of pure idealism, ' said Schelling, 'as well as the God of pure realism is necessarily impersonal. That is the God of Fichte and of Spinoza, but to me God is the living unity of all forces--the union of the ideal principle with itself in the bosom of its own dependence. This is spirit in the only true sense.' On the immortality of the soul, Schelling differs in nothing from Spinoza. 'The I, ' he says, 'with its essence undergoes neither conditions nor restrictions. Its primitive form is that of being, pure and eternal. We cannot say of it, it was or it will be, we can only say, it is. It exists absolutely. It is then outside of time and beyond it. The form of its intellectual intuition is eternity. Now since it is eternal it has no duration, for duration only relates to objects, so that eternity properly consists in having nothing to do with time.' This is the eternity which belongs to God, and, therefore, belongs to the human Boui, which finds its true life in God--whose essence is the essence of God, and as it returns to the source of its life, it loses its individuality, and knows itself a