Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/502

Rh are at once unlimited and good. We have however shown how all the Powers that be exist as necessary facts in the Infinite Thought, and how, apart from this thought, nothing is that is. Such is our conception. It is no new one in philosophy. We have tried with no small labor, and after tedious doubting, to make it our own. We have independently given our own reasons for it And we have asserted that here is an object of infinite religious worth.

And now we must add that we are quite indifferent whether anybody calls all this Theism or Pantheism. It differs from the commoner traditional forms of both. Both usually consider God as a Power, and either leave him off on one side to push things occasionally, or to set them going at the outset, or else identify him with his products. The former way of conceiving God is never more than half-philosophic. The latter way is apt to degenerate into wholly poetical rhapsodies. We take neither of these ways. For us Causation is a very subordinate idea in philosophy. It expresses only one form of the rational unity of things, and that an imperfect form. The world of the Powers is not yet an universe. Thought must be truer than Power, comprehending all the Powers, and much more besides, in its infinite unity. God as Power would be nothing, or finite. God as Thought can be and is all in all. And if this is philosophy, traditional Theism can do what it wishes to do about the matter.

In short, the present doctrine is the doctrine that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So far, said St.