Page "Victor Cousin" Paragraph 29

This theodicy of Cousin laid him open obviously enough to the charge of pantheism.

This he repels, and his answer may be summed up as follows.

Pantheism is properly the deification of the law of phenomena, the universe God.

But I distinguish the two finite causes self and not-self from each other and from the infinite cause.

They are not mere modifications of this cause or properties, as with Spinoza ,-- they are free forces having " their power or spring of action in themselves, and this is sufficient for our idea of independent finite reality.

I hold this, and I hold the relation of these as effects to the one supreme cause.

The God I plead for is neither the deity of Pantheism, nor the absolute unity of the Eleatics, a being divorced from all possibility of creation or plurality, a mere metaphysical abstraction.

The deity I maintain is creative, and necessarily creative.

The deity of Spinoza and the Eleatics is a mere substance, not a cause in any sense.

As to the necessity under which Deity exists of acting or creating, this is the highest form of liberty, it is the freedom of spontaneity, activity without deliberation.

His action is not the result of a struggle between passion and virtue.

He is free in an unlimited manner the purest spontaneity in man is but the shadow of the freedom of God.

He acts freely but not arbitrarily, and with the consciousness of being able to choose the opposite part.

He cannot deliberate or will as we do.

His spontaneous action excludes at once the efforts and the miseries of will and the mechanical operation of necessity.