asier and more
agreeable with our other ideas to go farther than not; for we should
see all animal and vegetable life as united by a subtle and till lately
invisible ramification, so that all living things are one tree-like
growth, forming a single person. But we cannot conceive of oceans,
continents, and air as forming parts of a person at all; much less
can we think of them as forming one person with the living forms that
inhabit them.

To ask this of us is like asking us to see the bowl and the water in
which three gold-fish are swimming as part of the gold-fish. We cannot
do it any more than we can do something physically impossible. We can
see the gold-fish as forming one family, and therefore as in a way
united to the personality of the parents from which they sprang, and
therefore as members one of another, and therefore as forming a single
growth of gold-fish, as boughs and buds unite to form a tree; but we
cannot by any effort of the imagination introduce the bowl and the water
into the personality, for we have never been accustomed to think of such
things as living and personal. Those, therefore, who tell us that "God
is everything, and everything is God," require us to see "everything"
as a person, which we cannot; or God as not a person, which again we
cannot.

Continuing the article of Mr. Blunt from which I have already quoted, I
read:--

"Linus, in a passage which has been preserved by Stobaeus, exactly
expresses the notion afterwards adopted by Spinoza: 'One sole energy
governs all things; all things are unity, and each portion is All; for
of one integer all things were born; in the end of time all things shall
again become unity; the unity of multiplicity.' Orpheus, his disciple,
taught no other doctrine."

According to Pythagoras, "an adept in the Orphic philosophy," "the soul
of the world is the Divine energy which interpenetrates every portion
of the mass, and the soul of man is an efflux of that energy. The world,
too, is an exact impress of the Eternal Idea, which is the mind of God."
John Scotus Erigena taught that "all is God and God is all." William
of Champeaux, again, two hundred years later, maintained that "all
individuality is one in substance, and varies only in its non-essential
accidents and transient properties." Amalric of Bena and David of Dinant
followed the theory out "into a thoroughgoing Pantheism." Amalric held
that "All is God and God is all. The Creator and the creature ar