We may also call pantheistic any system which regards the cosmic process as a real becoming of God.  According to this theory, God comes to Himself, attains full self-consciousness, in the highest of His creatures, which are, as it were, the organs of His self-unfolding Personality.  This is not a philosophy which commends itself specially to speculative mystics, because it involves the belief that time is an ultimate reality.  If in the cosmic process, which takes place in time, God becomes something which He was not before, it cannot be said that He is exalted above time, or that a thousand years are to Him as one day.  I shall say in my fourth Lecture that this view cannot justly be attributed to Eckhart.  Students of Hegel are not agreed whether it is or is not part of their master’s teaching.[183]

The idea of will as a world-principle—­not in Schopenhauer’s sense of a blind force impelling from within, but as the determination of a conscious Mind—­lifts us at once out of Pantheism.[184] It sets up the distinction between what is and what ought to be, which Pantheism cannot find room for, and at the same time implies that the cosmic process is already complete in the consciousness of God, which cannot be held if He is subordinated to the category of time.

God is more than the All, as being the perfect Personality, whose Will is manifested in creation under necessarily imperfect conditions.  He is also in a sense less than the All, since pain, weakness, and sin, though known to Him as infinite Mind, can hardly be felt by Him as infinite Perfection.  The function of evil in the economy of the universe is an inscrutable mystery, about which speculative Mysticism merely asserts that the solution cannot be that of the Manicheans.  It is only the Agnostic[185] who will here offer the dilemma of Dualism or Pantheism, and try to force the mystic to accept the second alternative.

There are two other views of the universe which have been called pantheistic, but incorrectly.

The first is that properly called Acosmism, which we have encountered as Orientalised Platonism.  Plato’s theory of ideas was popularised into a doctrine of two separate worlds, related to each other as shadow and substance.  The intelligible world, which is in the mind of God, alone exists; and thus, by denying reality to the visible world, we get a kind of idealistic Pantheism.  But the notion of God as abstract Unity, which, as we have seen, was held by the later Neoplatonists and their Christian followers, seems to make a real world impossible; for bare Unity cannot create, and the metaphor of the sun shedding his rays explains nothing.  Accordingly the “intelligible world,” the sphere of reality, drops out, and we are left with only the infra-real world and the supra-real One.  So we are landed in nihilism or Asiatic Mysticism[186].