The accounts given to us by the best authorities on Zoroaster and Parseeism scarcely justify us in thinking the religion of the Zendavesta to be Pantheistic in our sense of the term. For though it would appear that Ormuzd (or Ahuramazda), the God of light and goodness, originated in, or was born from and one with a nameless impersonal Unity, such as may answer to Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable," it cannot be accurately said that, according to the Persian view of the world, there is nothing but God. For, to say nothing of the apparently independent existence of the principle of darkness and evil called Ahriman, the relation of the Amshaspands, or supreme spirits, and of the Izeds, or secondary spirits, as well as of the Fereurs, or divine ideas to the impersonal Unity, seems to be rather that of emanations, than parts of a Whole. Again, if it be true that, according to the Zend Avesta, the conflict of light and darkness will ultimately cease, and Ahriman with his demons be annihilated, it is obvious that this implies a beginning and an end, with a process originating in the one, and consummated in the other. But such a process, though most actual on the finite scale, and joyfully or painfully real to us, contemplating, as we do only infinitesimal parts of the Universe, and always under the forms of time and space, is yet incongruous and incommensurate with the thought of one All in All, unlimited by time or space, and whose lifetime is an Eternal Now. Thus true Pantheism takes the Universe, as it is, in its infinity; regards it as without beginning or end; and worships it. Not that Pantheism denies the existence of evil or is unmoved by the struggle between evil and good, or is uninspired by faith in the reiterated triumph of good wherever the local conflict arises. But it insists that evil is relative to the finite parts of the Universe in their supposed isolation, and cannot possibly affect the Eternal All. It allows of no creation or emanation which would put any part of the "wondrous Whole" in opposition to, or separation from, the Eternal. But from its point of view all change, evolution, progress retrogression, sin, pain, or any other good or evil is local, finite, partial; while the infinite coordination of such infinitesimal movements make one eternal peace. [Sidenote: Pantheism in Ancient Egypt] [Sidenote: Permanent Effects of Prehistoric Animism.] [Sidenote: Isis, according to Plutarch.]