Our sacred books and traditions tell us of one God who made the heaven and the earth, and who on looking upon them said that they were very good. Here is where the trouble begins--a Creator apart from the universe who looks upon and approves the work of his hands. This is the early, childish view of mankind. As Bergson says, when we apply to the universe our idea of a maker and a thing made, trouble begins. The universe was not made; it is, and always has been. God is Nature, and Nature is God. If this is pantheism, then we are in good company, for Goethe said that as a philosopher he was a pantheist. Even the atheist has a god of his own. He knows that there is something back of him greater than he is. Most persons are pantheists without knowing it. Ask any of the good orthodox folk what God is, and they will say that He is a spirit. Ask them where He is, and they will answer, He is here, there, everywhere, in you and in me. And this is pantheism--all god--cosmotheism. “Truly all that we know of good and duty proceeds from Nature; but, none the less so, all that we know of evil.” “If there be a divine spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man,” says James. But does he not see that this term “divine spirit” is born of man’s narrowness and partiality; that Nature is all of one stuff, divine or diabolical, just as we elect? He says that the naturalistic superstition, the worship of God in nature, has begun to lose its hold upon the educated mind; that the first step toward getting into healthy relations with the universe is the act of rebellion against the God of nature. Poor James Thomson, the British poet whose pessimism, perhaps, caused him to commit suicide, whom our James loves to quote, hurled his scorn at a fiction of his own brain when he wrote: “Not for all thy power, furled or unfurled, For all thy temples to thy glory built, Would I assume the ignominious guilt Of having made such men in such a world.” The whole value of philosophy is to help us to a rational view of the universe, and when it fails to do this, it falls short of fulfilling its proper function. The contradictions of which James speaks do not disturb the naturalist at all. Nature would not be Nature without these contradictions; they do not disturb the unity of Nature. Empedocles taught that “there is no real creation or annihilation in the universal round of things, but an eternal mixing--due to the two eternal powers, Love and Hate--of one world-stuff in its sum unalterable and eternal.” And Whitman’s large lines mean the same thing: “There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” XIII HORIZON LINES I. THE ORIGIN OF LIFE