onstituted that we cannot avoid
framing the _idea_, although we can never attain to a _comprehension_,
of the Infinite. There are absolute truths, and necessary truths, among
the elements of human knowledge. Account for them as we may, their
reality cannot be reasonably denied, nor their importance disparaged.
There is a tendency--and a most useful one--in the human mind, to seek
unity in all things, to trace effects to causes, to reduce phenomena to
laws, to resolve the complex into the simple, and to rise from the
contingent to the absolute, from the finite to the infinite. There are
few more interesting inquiries in the department of Psychology than that
which seeks to investigate the nature, the origin, and the validity of
those ideas which introduce us into the region of absolute, eternal,
and immutable Truth; and it were a lamentable result of the erratic
speculations of Germany did they serve to cast discredit on this
inquiry, or even to excite a prejudice against it, in the more sober,
but not less profound, minds of our own countrymen. But there need be
little apprehension on this score, if it be clearly understood and
carefully remembered, that the philosophy of the absolute, as taught in
Germany and applied in support of Pantheism, rests ultimately on the
theory of Idealism and the doctrine of Identity, by which all is
resolved into one absolute "subject-object," and _existence_ is
identified with _thought_. _This_ system may be discarded, and yet there
may still remain a sound, wholesome, and innocuous philosophy of the
"absolute;" a philosophy which does not seek to identify things so
generically different as _existence_ and _thought_, or to reduce mind
and matter, the finite and the infinite, to the same category; but
which, recognizing the differences subsisting between the various
objects of thought, seeks merely to investigate the nature and sources
of that part of human knowledge which relates to absolute or necessary
truths. The former of these rival systems may be favorable to Pantheism,
the latter will be found to be in entire accordance with Christian
Theism.

The fundamental principle of philosophical Pantheism is either _the
unity of substance_, as taught by Spinoza, or _the identity of existence
and thought_, as taught, with some important variations, by Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel. The Absolute is conceived of, not as a living
Being to whom a proper personality and certain intelligible attribu