Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/160

144 words followed one another as leisurely as one canal boat after another, drew his arguments from the German philosophy which was at that time very much studied in Leyden. He ridiculed the narrow-minded men who attribute to God a particular private existence; he even accused them of blasphemy, because they gifted God with wisdom, justice, love, and other human qualities, which are utterly inappropriate, because these are relatively the negations or antitheses of human errors, such as stupidity, injustice, and hate. But when Van Pitter thus developed his own pantheistic views, there came forth against him the fat Fichtean, Dricksen of Utrecht, who stoutly confuted his vague conception of a God spread forth through all Nature—that is to say, existing only in space. Yes, he even declared it was blasphemy to so much as speak of the existence of God, since the very idea of existence involved that of space—in short, something substantial. Yes, it was blasphemy even to say of God He is, because the purest or most abstract Being could not be conceived without limitations of sense, whereas, if man would think of God, he must abstract Him from all substance, and not think of Him as a form of extension, but as a series or order of developments, God not being an action per se, but only the principle of a cosmos beyond conception.