content them. Having got them we must make the best and not the
worst of them. Surely, in the greater part of what has been
quoted above, the words are barren letters only: they do not
quicken within us and enable us to conceive a thought, such as we
can in our turn impress upon dead matter, and mould [sic] that
matter into another shape than its own, through the thought which
has become alive within us. No offspring of ideas has followed
upon them, or, if any at all, yet in such unwonted shape, and
with such want of alacrity, that we loathe them as malformations
and miscarriages of our minds. Granted that if we examine them
closely we shall at length find them to embody a little germ of
truth-that is to say, of coherency with our other ideas; but
there is too little truth in proportion to the trouble necessary
to get at it. We can get more truth, that is to say, more
coherency-for truth and coherency are one-for less trouble in
other ways.

But it may be urged that the beginnings of all tasks are
difficult and unremunerative, and that later developments of
Pantheism may be more intelligible than the earlier ones.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. On continuing Mr. Blunt's
article, I find the later Pantheists a hundredfold more
perplexing than the earlier ones. With Kant, Schelling, Fichte,
and Hegel, we feel that we are with men who have been decoyed
into a hopeless quagmire; we understand nothing of their
language-we doubt whether they understand themselves, and feel
that we can do nothing with them but look at them and pass them
by.

In my next chapter I propose to show the end which the early