Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/103

] Besides so handily explaining all the evil in the world, the finiteness of Biologos has another great advantage: it makes him so easy to grasp by the imagination. If we have any difficulty in understanding how God can be present and active in all parts of the universe at once, we are to remember that the less the density the greater the worth of things. "The more the density, the more unlike God" (p. 217). Water is more important for life than inorganic solids, air than water, ether than air. Now Biologos may be thought of as a substance as much thinner than the ether as the ether is thinner than air. This explains, too, why he cannot act on matter in the mass, but only on the infinitesimal forces of the cell, and accordingly has so much difficulty in establishing his dominion over the world. To reach this pre-Socratic description of spirit after two hundred pages in which materialism is roundly and repeatedly denounced, is indeed surprising, though not more so than to discover later on that Biologos and man stand to each other in a quite pantheistic state of identity (p. 226), while the doctrine of human freedom is reiterated throughout the book. In short, this new theory of the universe consists of a wholly uncritical mixture of dualism (God and the physical world), materialism (the nature of God), and pantheism (God and man), and all on the basis of the naïvest of naïve realism. And this, too, from a writer who, according to his own statement, has been ransacking the wisdom of ethnic religions and systems of philosophy and of natural theology for twenty or more years (p. 9).

One is tempted to characterize the work in one of its own phrases as a mass of "hypocritic illogicality" (p. 98). But this would be unjust. The "illogicality" is all there, both in the general framework of the theory and in numerous particulars, but it is not "hypocritic." The author is intensely sincere. His spirit of genuine moral earnestness is unmistakable and worthy of the highest praise. Unfortunately his zeal is without knowledge. While quite free from all conscious hypocrisy, the book is in a way profoundly immoral. We mean this: it is really morally wrong to publish a book which makes such pretensions to superior originality, and displays such ignorance of the philosophy and theology which it assumes to transcend. No one at the present day would think of ignoring or uncritically thrusting to one side all the astronomy of the past and beginning a work on that subject de novo. It is just as senseless for any one to suppose that he can ignore all the metaphysics of the past and then make any contribution of value to philosophy or theology.