ike in form, philosophy
nevertheless tended to highly abstract conceptions of supreme, or real,
deity. Philo followed out the line of this tradition in teaching that
God cannot be named. How much exactly he meant is disputed. The same
inheritance of Greek philosophy appears in the Christian fathers,
especially Origen. He names and condemns the "anthropomorphites," who
ascribe a human body to God (on Romans i., _sub fin_.; Rufinus' Latin
version). In Arabian philosophy the reaction sought to deny that God had
any attributes. And, under the influence of Mahommedan Aristotelianism,
the same paralysing speculation found entrance among the learned Jews of
Spain (see MAIMONIDES).

Till modern times the philosophical reaction was not carried out with
full vigour. Spinoza (_Ethics_, i. 15 and 17), representing here as
elsewhere both a Jewish inheritance and a philosophical, but advancing
further, sweeps away all community between God and man. So later J.G.
Fichte and Matthew Arnold ("a magnified and non-natural
man"),--strangely, in view of their strong belief in an objective moral
order. For the use of the _word_ "anthropomorphic," or kindred forms, in
this new spirit of condemnation for all conceptions of God as
manlike--sense (b) noted above--see J.J. Rousseau in _Emile_ iv. (cited
by Littre),--_Nous sommes pour la plupart de vrais anthropomorphites_.
Rousseau is here speaking of the language of Christian theology,--a
divine Spirit: divine Persons. At the present day this usage is
universal. What it means on the lips of pantheists is plain. But when
theists charge one another with "anthropomorphism," in order to rebuke
what they deem unduly manlike conceptions of God, they stand on slippery
ground. All theism implies the assertion of kinship between man,
especially in his moral being, and God. As a brilliant theologian, B.
Duhm, has said, physiomorphism is the enemy of Christian faith, not
anthropomorphism.

The latest extension of the word, proposed in the interests of
philosophy or psychology, uses it of the principle according to which
man is said to interpret all things (not God merely) through himself.
Common-sense intuitionalism would deny that man does this, attributing
to him immediate knowledge of reality. And idealism in all its forms
would say that man, interpreting through his reason, does rightly, and
reaches truth. Even here then the use of the word is not colourless. It
implies blame. It is the symptom of a