A large class speak of it as the great soul of the world, while the more materialistic regard it as the world itself, body and soul; the soul being the sum of all the imponderable forces, such as gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, galvanism, vegetable and animal life, and especially the mesmeric influence, of which many of them regard intellect as a modification; and the body being the sum of all the ponderable substances, such as air, water, earth, minerals, vegetables, and bodies of animals and men.

This creed is popularly expressed in the sentence so often heard, "God is everything, and everything is God." But this vast generalization of all things into the higher unity--this exalting of monkeys, men, snails, and paving stones to the same level of divinity--by no means meets the views of the more unphilosophical and aspiring gods and goddesses, for the very reason that it is so impartial.

To deify a man and his cat by the same process is not much of a distinction to the former; and of what advantage is it to be made a god, if he does not thereby obtain some distinction?
This leveling apotheosis is generally confined to the German Pantheists; their more ambitious American brethren ascribe the contented humility which accepts it to the continual influence of the fumes of tobacco and lager beer.
Man is the great deity of the other class.

Renan boldly says: "For myself, I believe there is not in the universe an intelligence superior to that of man; the absolute of justice and reason manifests itself only in humanity; regarded apart from humanity that absolute exists only as an abstraction.

The infinite exists only when it clothes itself in form."[23] And as the soul of man is, rather inconsistently for people who believe everything God, supposed to be superior to the rest of him, they go off into great rhapsodies of adoration of their own souls.
"The doctrine of the soul--first _soul_, and second _soul_, and evermore _soul_"[24]--is the doctrine which is to regenerate the world.