om pantheism.

+1006+. _Nontheistic systems._ A further attempt to secure a complete
unity of the world appears in those systems of thought which regard the
world as self-sufficient and, therefore, dispense with extramundane
agency. These start either from the point of view of man and human life
or from contemplation of the world. In China the sense of the sole
importance of the moral life and the impossibility of knowing anything
beyond mundane life led Confucius practically to ignore divine agency.
He did not deny the existence of Powers outside of men, but he declined
to speak of them, regarding them as of no practical importance. This
sort of agnosticism appears in Greece as early as the fifth century
B.C., when Protagoras's view that "man is the measure of all things"
makes extrahuman Powers superfluous. Epicurus reached a similar
practical atheism apparently from a scientific view of the construction
of the world. According to him there are gods, but they are
otiose--living a life of happy ease, they are to be thought of as a
pleasant phenomenon in the world, but ineffective as regards human
fortunes, and men may go their ways certain that if they obey the laws
of the world the gods will not interfere with them.

+1007+. The Sankhya philosophy of India dispenses completely with gods,
holding that the primordial stuff is eternal, but it also holds that
souls have a separate existence and are eternal. Thus a species of
dualism emerges. Buddhism goes a step further, ignoring the soul as well
as gods. It is agnostic in that, admitting the world to have a cause, it
holds that it is impossible to know this cause. Its practical aim--to
get rid of suffering by getting rid of desire, and thus to pass into a
blissful state of existence in which apparently there is to be no effort
as there is to be no pain--has enabled it to establish a vigorous
organization, a sort of church, in which the undefined universe takes
the place of a personal god, and character takes the place of soul, this
character (Karma) passing from one being to another without the
assumption of identity in the beings thus united in destiny.[1826]

+1008+. In Greece pure materialism (similar in essence to the Sankhya)
took the shape of the assumption of an original and eternal mass of
atoms whence have come all forms of being (so Democritus in the fifth
century B.C.), and this conception was adopted by Epicurus and expounded
at length by Lucretius.[1827] T