attracted religious people, yet it can hardly be disputed that he gave
an impulse to contemplative religion, of which the effect is only now
beginning to be fully realised.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: If Buddha occurs to the reader, it should be remembered
that he was not a Pantheist at all. His ultimate aim was the dissolution
of personality in the Nothing. But that is not Pantheism.]




CHAPTER I


PRE-CHRISTIAN PANTHEISM

[Sidenote: Its Origins Doubtful and Unimportant.]

[Sidenote: The Secret of Pantheism is Within us.]

It has been the customary and perhaps inevitable method of writers on
Pantheism to trace its main idea back to the dreams of Vedic poets, the
musings of Egyptian priests, and the speculations of the Greeks. But
though it is undeniable that the divine unity of all Being was an almost
necessary issue of earliest human thought upon the many and the one, yet
the above method of treating Pantheism is to some extent misleading; and
therefore caution is needed in using it. For the revival of Pantheism at
the present day is much more a tangible resultant of action and reaction