soul of the world, while the more
materialistic regard it as the world itself, body and soul; the soul
being the sum of all the imponderable forces, such as gravitation, heat,
light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and
especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard
intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum of all the
ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables,
and bodies of animals and men. This creed is popularly expressed in the
sentence so often heard, "God is everything, and everything is God." But
this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity--this
exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving stones to the same level of
divinity--by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and
aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so
impartial. To deify a man and his cat by the same process is not much of
a distinction to the former; and of what advantage is it to be made a
god, if he does not thereby obtain some distinction? This leveling
apotheosis is generally confined to the German Pantheists; their more
ambitious American brethren ascribe the contented humility which accepts
it to the continual influence of the fumes of tobacco and lager beer.

Man is the great deity of the other class. Renan boldly says: "For
myself, I believe there is not in the universe an intelligence superior
to that of man; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only
in humanity; regarded apart from humanity that absolute exists only as
an abstraction. The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in
form."[23] And as the soul of man is, rather inconsistently for people
who believe everything God, supposed to be superior to the rest of him,
they go off into great rhapsodies of adoration of their own souls.

"The doctrine of the soul--first _soul_, and second _soul_, and evermore
_soul_"[24]--is the doctrine which is to regenerate the world. God, in
their view, is nothing till he attains self-consciousness in man. "The
universal does not attract us till housed in the individual. Who heeds
the waste abyss of possibility? Standing on the bare ground, my head
bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mere
egotism vanishes. The currents of the universal being circulate through
me. I am part or particle of God." "I stand here to say, 'Let us worship
the mighty and transcendent soul.'" "G