If we inquire into the tendency of all types of ancient or modern pantheism in this particular phase, we shall find them, without exception, fatalistic.  They not merely make God the author of sin—­they make Him the sinner.  Our misdeeds are not our acts, but God’s.  Thus the vaunted Bhagavad Gita, uniting the Sankhyan and the Vedanta philosophies, makes Krishna say to Arjuna:  “All actions are incessantly performed by operation of the qualities of Prakriti (the self-existing Essence).  Deluded by the thought of individuality, the soul vainly believes itself to be the doer.  The soul, existing from eternity, devoid of qualities, imperishable, abiding in the body, acts not, nor is by any act polluted.  He who sees that actions are performed by Prakriti alone, and that the soul is not an actor, perceives the truth."[199] Such is Hindu pantheism.  Yet this most inconsistent system charges man with guilt.  It represents his inexorable fate as pursuing him through endless transmigrations, holding over him the lash of retribution, while it exacts the very last farthing.  Still, from first to last, it is not he that acts, but some fractional part of the One only Existence which fills all space.

The philosophy of Spinoza was quite as fatalistic as the Hindu Vedanta.  He taught, according to Schwegler, that “The finite has no independent existence in itself:  it exists because the unrestrained productive energy of the (infinite) Substance spontaneously produced an infinite variety of particular forms.  It has, however, no proper reality; it exists only in and through the Substance.  Finite things are the most external, the last, the most subordinate forms of existence into which the universal life is specialized, and they manifest their finitude in that they are without resistance, subject to the infinite chain of causality which binds the world.  The divine Substance works freely according to the inner essence of its own nature; individuals, however, are not free, but are subject to the influence of those things with which they come into contact.  It follows from these metaphysical grounds,” Schwegler continues, “that what is called free-will cannot be admitted.  For, since man is only a mode, he, like any other mode, stands in an endless series of conditioning causes, and no free-will can, therefore, be predicated of him.”  Further on he adds:  “Evil, or sin, is, therefore, only relative and not positive, for nothing happens against God’s will.  It is only a simple negation or deprivation, which only seems to be a reality in our representation."[200] The late Samuel Johnson, in his chapter on “The Morality and Piety of Pantheism,” undertakes to defend both the Vedantic and the Spinozan philosophy by pointing out a distinction between an “external compulsion and an inner force which merges us in the Infinite.  Though both are equally efficient as to the result, and both are inconsistent with individual freedom, yet real fate is only that which is external....