in certain philosophies, of generous ideas and elevated conceptions.  Such men, while they put God out of existence, desire to keep the true, the beautiful, the good; they hope to preserve the rays, while they extinguish the luminous centre from which they proceed.  Such systems always tend to produce the deadly fruits pointed out in my last lecture; but men devoted to the severe labors of the intellect often escape, by a noble inconsistency, the natural results of their theories.  Therefore, in the inquiry on which we are about to enter, the term ‘atheism’ implies, with regard to persons, neither reproach nor contempt.  It simply indicates a doctrine, the doctrine which denies God.  This denial takes place in two ways:  It is affirmed that nature, that is to say matter, force devoid of intelligence and of will, is the sole origin of things; or, the reality is acknowledged of those marks which raise mind above nature, but it is affirmed that humanity is the highest point of the universe, and that above it there is nothing.  Such are the two forms of atheism.

Perhaps you expect here the explanation of a doctrine which is often described as holding a sort of middle place between the negation and the affirmation of God, namely, pantheism.  Pantheism, in the true sense of that word, is a system according to which God is all, and the universe nothing.  This extraordinary thesis is met with in India.  A Greek, Parmenides, has vigorously sustained it.  We have in it a kind of sublime infatuation.  In presence of the one and eternal Being thought collapses in bewilderment; and thenceforward it experiences for all that is manifold and transitory a disdain which passes into negation.  In the domain of experience, all is limited, temporary, imperfect; and reason seeks the perfect, the eternal, the infinite.  The doctrine of creation alone explains how the universe subsists in presence of its first cause.  In ignorance of this doctrine, some bold thinkers have cut the knot which they could not untie.  They have declared that reason alone is right, and that experience is wrong:  the world does not exist, it is but an illusion of the mind.  Whence proceeds this illusion?  If perfection alone exists, how comes that imperfect mind to exist which deceives itself in believing in the reality of the world?  To this question the system has no answer.  Such is true pantheism; but it is not to dangers so noble that most minds run the risk of succumbing.  What is commonly understood by pantheism is the deification of the universe.  The idea of God is not directly denied, but it undergoes a transformation which destroys it.  God is no longer the eternal and Almighty Spirit, the Creator; but the unconscious principle, the substance of things, the whole.  The universe alone exists; above it there is nothing; but the universe is infinite, eternal, divine.  The higher wants of the reason, mingling with the data derived from experience, form an imposing and confused image, which, while it beguiles the imagination,