eculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different age
to men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged.
The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite
expression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the
incarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity;
and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the
matter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its
means of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less
pliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeed
cultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into the
One; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperament
could hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense must
discountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, in
theory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, as
with the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vital
social forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part of
neo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had
accordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may
gladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can
be mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in
success and its fidelity to instinct.

[Sidenote: Pantheism accepted.]

An absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will is
Stoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonic
absolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernatural
destiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent in
existence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate before
cosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity,
for salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which they
regard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like the
Stoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspired
and altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place and
function in it was unholy and perverse. This world-worship, despising
heartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact,
whatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Were
the people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction their
corruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to i