He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox
conception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a
judge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any
sympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred
the _Paradiso_ of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to
the popular _Inferno_ itself, could evidently be attracted by
Christian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as
expressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A
pantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this
whole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any
conscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of
the whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a
panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the
individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral
ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the
essence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the
chief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He
maintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused
among all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful
and the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose
it.
Pages:
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229