also reacted strongly against materialism in
thought and life; we have begun to see, as has been said, how the need
and force of personality have the right to assert themselves against the
dominance of things. We are beginning to recognize the right of religion
and philosophy to suggest terms to science, and all these tendencies
have combined to produce a considerable group of people who, having
found, for one reason or another, no real satisfaction in their
inherited Christianity, have welcomed the Eastern solution of the
problems of life, or else have positively turned to the East in the hope
of discovering what Western Christianity has not been able to give them.
One should add also that the pure love of speculation which is one of
the phases of modern thought has made an opening in the West for the
East. If unlimited speculation is the main business of life, the East
has certainly everything to offer us, and for warning, as we shall
presently see, as well as for guidance.

_Pantheism and Its Problems_

The older Eastern religions are, to begin with, Pantheistic. We have
seen how religion generally in its development takes form and content
from its governing conception of God. We have seen also that there are
three governing conceptions of God: He is conceived as Transcendent or
Immanent, or else He is simply identified with the range and force of
the universe. Pantheism is generally the creation of brooding wonder and
uncritical thought; Pantheism feels rather than thinks; it accepts
rather than seeks to explain. It may be devout enough but its devotion
is passive rather than active. Pantheism is never scientific in the
accepted sense of that term; it has little concern for law; it explains
by personalizing the forces with which it has to deal; it is akin to the
temper which finds some animating spirit in all natural phenomena. The
flow of waters, the growth of things, the drift of clouds across the sky
are all, for Pantheism, simply the revelation of the action of some
indwelling spirit or other, without which they could neither exist nor
go on.

At its worst Pantheism issues in a grotesque mythology and an
inconceivable multiplication of divinity; the gods in the Hindu Pantheon
are numbered by the thousands. At its best Pantheism issues in a kind of
mystic poetry and creates a devotee sensitive as Tagore to the fugitive
gleams of beauty through the murk of things, voicing his prayers and
insights in rare phra