What is pantheism, in the ordinary meaning of the word?  We have already said:  it is a doctrine which absorbs God in the universe, which confounds Him with nature, and makes of Him only the inert substance, the unconscious principle of the universe.  These are the two great conceptions which wrestle, in the history of human thought, against the idea of the Creator.  These two systems triumph easily one over the other, because each of them contains a portion of truth which is wanting to its antagonist.  They cannot support themselves because each of them has in it a portion of error.  This is what we must well understand.

Deism contains a portion of truth; for it maintains a Creator essentially distinct from the Creation, or, according to an expression which I translate from an ancient Indian poem:  “One single act of His created the Universe, and He remained Himself whole and entire.”  This thought is true.  What is the error of deism?  It is that it makes a God like to a man who works upon matter existing previously to his action, and who puts in operation forces independent of himself, and which he does nothing but employ.  In this way a watchmaker makes a watch which goes afterwards without him, because the watchmaker only sets to work forces which have an independent existence, and which continue to act when he has ceased his labor.  We work upon matter foreign to us.  The workman did not make matter, but only disposes of it, and he can never do more than modify the action of forces which do not proceed from his will, and have not been regulated by his understanding.  But the Being who is the cause of all cannot dispose of foreign forces which act afterwards by themselves, since there exists in His work no principle of action other than those which He has Himself placed in it.

Deism results therefore from a confusion between the work of a creature placed in a preexisting world, and the work of the Supreme Will which is in itself the single and absolute cause of all.  It contains an element of dualism:  its God does not create; but organizes a world the being of which does not depend on him.  Take what is true in deism—­the existence of the only God; remember that the Creator is the absolute Cause of the universe; and the distinction between ensemble and detail will vanish, and you will understand that God is too great that there should be anything small in His eyes: 

     God measures not our lot by line and square: 
       The grass-suspended drop of morning dew
     Reflects a firmament as vast and fair
       As Ocean from his boundless field of blue.[171]

In other words, take what is true in deism, and accept all the consequences of it, and you will arrive at the full doctrine of the creation.