Such is the inevitable result at which Pantheism, even that kind termed idealistic Pantheism, ultimately arrives, whatever the elevation of mind and the morality of intent in its first authors. This is no scientific doctrine, founded upon the observation of facts and their laws; it is an hypothesis framed by dint of violent abstractions, verbal commutations and reasoning, in the blindness of a thought drunk with itself. Under the breath of Pantheism all beings--real and personal beings--vanish, and are replaced by an abstraction becoming in its turn the Being _par excellence;_ the sole being, although without personality and without volition, swallowing up all things in a bottomless abyss, which absorbs that being, too, after it has already absorbed everything that it has sought so to explain. {329} Was there ever, in the conceptions of mythology, or in the mystical dreams of the human imagination, anything so artificial, anything so vain, as this hypothesis, which at its very beginning, as well as throughout its entire course, loses sight of the best attested facts respecting man and the world; and, shocking equally science and common sense, departs as much from the method of philosophy as from the spontaneous instincts of mankind? --------------------------------------- {330} Sixth Meditation. Materialism. Materialistic Pantheism is more consistent and more intelligible. I must at once restore to it its genuine name; it has no right to that of Pantheism: it sees God neither in the universe nor in man; the eternal world and ephemeral individuals are, in its eyes, only combinations and different forms of matter. It is Materialism in its principle, and Atheism in its consequences. Two things strike me in the actual state of men's minds; the progress that Materialism is making, and its constant timidity in that very progress. {331}