h makes this system of philosophy distasteful to many minds: it is
the absence of any similar acknowledgment which forms the attraction and
the seductiveness of Pantheism in one way, and of Positivism in another.
The pantheist is not troubled with the difficulty of reconciling the
philosophy of the absolute with belief in a personal God; for belief in a
personal God is no part of his creed. Like the Christian, he may profess
to acknowledge a first principle, one, and simple, and indivisible, and
unconditioned; but he has no need to give to this principle the name of
God, or to invest it with such attributes as are necessary to satisfy
man's religious wants. His God (so far as he acknowledges one at all) is
not the first principle and cause of all things, but the aggregate of the
whole--an universal substance underlying the world of phenomena, or an
universal process, carried on in and by the changes of things. Hence, as
Aristotle said of the Eleatics, that, by asserting all things to be one,
they annihilated causation, which is the production of one thing from
another, so it may be said of the various schools of Pantheism, that, by
maintaining all things to be God, they evade rather than solve the great
problem of philosophy, that of the relation between God and His
creatures. The positivist, on the other hand, escapes the difficulty by
an opposite course. He declines all inquiry into reality and causation,
and maintains that the only office of philosophy is to observe and
register the invariable relations of succession and similitude in
phenomena. He does not necessarily deny the existence of God; but his
personal belief, be it what it may, is a matter of utter indifference to
his system. Religion and philosophy may perhaps go on side by side; but
their provinces are wholly distinct, and therefore there is no need to
attempt a reconciliation between them. God, as a first cause, lives like
an Epicurean deity in undisturbed ease, apart from the world of
phenomena, of which alone philosophy can take cognisance: philosophy, as
the science of phenomena, contents itself with observing the actual state
of things, without troubling itself to inquire how that state of things
came into existence. Hence, neither Pantheism nor Positivism is troubled
to explain the relation of the One to the Many; for the former
acknowledges only the One, and the latter acknowledges only the Many.

It is between these two systems, both seductive from