at matter
into another shape than its own, through the thought which has become
alive within us. No offspring of ideas has followed upon them, or, if
any at all, yet in such unwonted shape, and with such want of alacrity,
that we loathe them as malformations and miscarriages of our minds.
Granted that if we examine them closely we shall at length find them
to embody a little germ of truth-that is to say, of coherency with our
other ideas; but there is too little truth in proportion to the trouble
necessary to get at it. We can get more truth, that is to say, more
coherency-for truth and coherency are one-for less trouble in other
ways.

But it may be urged that the beginnings of all tasks are difficult and
unremunerative, and that later developments of Pantheism may be more
intelligible than the earlier ones. Unfortunately, this is not the
case. On continuing Mr. Blunt's article, I find the later Pantheists a
hundredfold more perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling,
Fichte, and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed
into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their language-we
doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel that we can do
nothing with them but look at them and pass them by.

In my next chapter I propose to show the end which the early Pantheists
were striving after, and the reason and naturalness of their error.

CHAPTER IV. PANTHEISM.

The earlier Pantheists were misled by the endeavour [sic] to lay hold of
two distinct ideas, the one of which was a reality that has since been
grasped and is of inestimable value, the other a phantom which has
misled all who have followed it. The reality is the unity of Life, the
oneness of the guiding and animating spirit which quickens animals and
plants, so that they are all the outcome and expression of a common
mind, and are in truth one animal; the phantom is the endeavour [sic] to
find the origin of things, to reach the fountain-head of all energy,
and thus to lay the foundations on which a philosophy may be constructed
which none can accuse of being baseless, or of arguing in a circle.

In following as through a thick wood after the phantom our forefathers
from time to time caught glimpses of the reality, which seemed so
wonderful as it eluded them, and flitted back again into the thickets,
that they declared it must be the phantom they were in search of, which
was thus evidenced as actually existing. Whereon,