of the mental faculties, and an investigation of the constitution, function, limits, and applicability ‘ad quas res’, of each.  The application to this subject of the rules and forms of the understanding, or discursive logic, or even of the intuitions of the reason itself, if reason be assumed as the first and highest, has Pantheism for its necessary result.  But this the Cabalists did:  and consequently the Cabalistic theosophy is Pantheistic, and Pantheism, in whatever drapery of pious phrases disguised, is (where it forms the whole of a system) Atheism, and precludes moral responsibility, and the essential difference of right and wrong.  One of the two contra-distinctions of the Hebrew Revelation is the doctrine of positive creation.  This, if not the only, is the easiest and surest criterion between the idea of God and the notion of a ‘mens agitans molem’.  But this the Cabalists evaded by their double meaning of the term, ‘nothing’, namely as nought = 0, and as no ‘thing’; and by their use of the term, as designating God.  Thus in words and to the ear they taught that the world was made out of nothing; but in fact they meant and inculcated, that the world was God himself expanded.  It is not, therefore, half a dozen passages respecting the first three ’proprietates’[2] in the Sephiroth, that will lead a wise man to expect the true doctrine of the Trinity in the Cabalistic scheme:  for he knows that the scholastic value, the theological necessity, of this doctrine consists in its exhibiting an idea of God, which rescues our faith from both extremes, Cabalo-Pantheism, and Anthropomorphism.  It is, I say, to prevent the necessity of the Cabalistic inferences that the full and distinct developement of the doctrine of the Trinity becomes necessary in every scheme of dogmatic theology.  If the first three ‘proprietates’ are God, so are the next seven, and so are all ten.  God according to the Cabalists is all in each and one in all.  I do not say that there is not a great deal of truth in this; but I say that it is not, as the Cabalists represent it, the whole truth.  Spinoza himself describes his own philosophy as in substance the same with that of the ancient Hebrew Doctors, the Cabalists—­only unswathed from the Biblical dress.

Ib. p. 61.

Similar to this is the declaration of R. Moses ben Maimon.  “For that influence, which flows from the Deity to the actual production of abstract intelligences flows also from the intelligences to their production from each other in succession,” &c.

How much trouble would Mr. Oxlee have saved himself, had he in sober earnest asked his own mind, what he meant by emanation; and whether he could attach any intelligible meaning to the term at all as applied to spirit.

Ib. p. 65.