The ‘Idea of God’ to which Servetus had attained is unquestionably grand. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is eternal, one and indivisible, and in himself inscrutable, but making his being known in and through creation; so that not only is every living, but every lifeless thing, an aspect of the Deity. Before creation was, God was; but neither was he Light, nor Word, nor Spirit, but some ineffable thing else--_sed quid aliud ineffabile_--these, Light, Word, Spirit, being mere dispensations, modes or expressions of pre-existing Deity. (‘Dial.’ i. 4.) God, he says, has no proper nature; for this would imply a beginning; and _before_ and _after_ are terms that have no significance when they are referred to God. Though God knew what to man would be a future, his own prescience was without respect to _time_, and involved no such necessity as is implied in _choice_. God, he continues, can be defined by nothing that pertains to body; he created the world of himself, of his substance, and, as essence, he actuates--_essentiat_--all things. (‘Dial.’ ii.) The Spirit of God is the universal agent; it is in the air we breathe, and is the very breath of life; it moves the heavenly bodies; sends out the winds from their quarters; takes up and stores the water in the clouds, and pours it out as rain to fertilise the earth. God is therefore ever distinct from the universe of things, and when we speak of the Word, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we but speak of the presence and power of God projected into creation, animating and actuating all that therein is, man more especially than aught else; ‘the Holy Spirit I always say is the motion of God in the soul of man, and that out of man there cannot properly be said to be any Holy Spirit.’ (‘De Trin. Err.’ f. 85, b, and ‘Dial.’ ii.) This is obviously a statement of what may be called the Exo-pantheistic principle in very broad terms, akin to what we find in the Grecian mythology and certain schools of philosophy; other than the Endo-pantheistic conception of later times--the Causa Principio et Uno of Giordano Bruno,[27] the Substantia of Spinoza, the Universum or Kosmos of Goethe,[28] Hegel, Humboldt, Schopenhauer, D. F. Strauss,[29] &c. It is the Principle inseparable from the mighty All as from the individual Atom, or Pantheism proper. We shall, by-and-by, find our author, on his Geneva trial, damaging his case and exciting, we may imagine, the astonishment of the unlettered among his judges, by the assertion of his pantheistic notions, and arousing the needless, and it may even be, the assumed ire of Calvin--for he was familiar with the idea, having said himself that he only objected to call Nature, God, because it was a hard and improper expression--_quia est dura et impropria loquutio_.[30]