ts own abandonment, for
it would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which its
convenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety,
even if their object be material and their worship idolatrous, exalt the
mind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplation
a theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will
have purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you
afresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can.
Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there
it instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are
for the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only
interested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency of
the society in which they live. Their pantheism under these
circumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into
practical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for
all its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprove
naturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals where
naturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the most
uncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finite
soul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and that
nature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine that
they have no value whatever save by the services they may render to each
spirit in its specific and genuine ambitions.

[Sidenote: Plainer scorn for the ideal.]

Indeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens to
exist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoral
tendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminaries
into the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority,
their favourite passions and to sing the picturesqueness of a
blood-stained world. "Practical" men follow, deprecating any reflection
which may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosen
activities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid,
brutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn to
invoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves the
trouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secret
indifference to the world's happiness. The follies thus sanctioned
theoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, would