theory of creation, that God is all, that there are in truth no
creatures, but only unreal phantasies appearing to darkened human minds,
because darkened and half-blind. As such, its nearest Christian analogue
would be the thought that in every phenomenon we have God's fiat and
God's reason, and that "in Him we live and move and have our being."
Pantheism is a theory of spiritual culture, that our individuality is
ours only to merge it in His, although on this line, the Christian soon
parts company with the Indian pantheistic devotee, who seeks to _merge_
his consciousness in God, not to train himself into active sonship.
Pantheism is a theory of God's omnipresence, and may be little more than
enthusiastic feeling of God's omnipresence, such as we have in the 139th
psalm, "Whither shall I go from Thy presence? and whither shall I flee
from Thy spirit?" That Oriental mysticism and loyalty to an idea we can
allow for. It is in that aspect that pantheism is in closest contact
with the belief of the new educated Hindu. But in brahmanical
philosophy, pantheism is nothing else than the inability to pass beyond
the initial idea of infinite preexistent, unconditioned, Deity. To the
pantheist, let us remember, there is Deity, but there are no real
deities; there is a Godhead, but there are no real persons in the
Godhead. In the view of the pantheist, when we see aught else divine or
human than this all-embracing Deity or Godhead, it is only a
self-created mist of the dim human eye, in which there play the
flickering phantasms of deities and human individuals and things. "In
the Absolute, there is no thou, nor I, nor God," said Ramkrishna, a
great Hindu saint who died in 1886.[78] In Hindu phraseology, every
conception other than this all-comprehending Deity is _Maya_ or
delusion, and salvation is "saving knowledge" of the delusion, and
therefore deliverance from it. The perception of _manifoldness_ is Maya
or illusion, says a modern pro-Hindu writer. And again, "To India, all
that exists is but a mighty curtain of appearances, tremulous now and