Cartes, if he did not originate it, was the first to develop into
philosophic significance, and which ever since has been the
prevailing ontology of the Western world. So deeply has the thought
of that master mind inwrought itself into the very consciousness of
humanity!

Spinoza saw, that, if God alone can bring mind and matter together
and effect a relation between them, it follows that mind and matter,
or their attributes, however contrary, do meet in Deity; and if so,
what need of three distinct natures? What need of two substances
beside God, as subjects of these attributes? Retain the middle term
and drop the extremes and you have the Spinozan doctrine of one
(uncreated) substance, combining the attributes of thought and
extension. This is Pantheism, or _objective_ idealism, as
distinguished from the _subjective_ idealism of Fichte. Strange,
that the stigma of atheism should have been affixed to a system
whose very starting-point is Deity and whose great characteristic is
the _ignoration_ of everything but Deity, insomuch that the pure and
devout Novalis pronounced the author a God-drunken man, and
Spinozism a surfeit of Deity. [17]

[Footnote 17: Let us not be misunderstood. Pantheism is not Theism, and
the one substance of Spinoza is very unlike the one God of theology;
but neither is the doctrine Atheism in any legitimate sense.]

Naturally enough, the charge of atheism comes from the unbelieving
Bayle, whose omnivorous mind, like the anaconda, assisted its
enormous deglutition with a poisonous saliva of its own, and whose
negative temper makes the "Dictionnaire Historique" more _Morgue_
than _Valhalla_.