Such an absorption of all things in the infinite, with the consequent loss of personality, individuality, and all moral responsibility, had a most depressing effect upon the character of the people who embraced this strange system. This is so manifest that it may be plainly read in the sombre character of their architectural remains.
'In their subterranean, vast, and dim excavations; in the gigantic proportions of their colossal architecture, always impressing us with sadness and with the nothingness of man; in their long, still, damp, dreary cities of sepulchres; in their half-shrouded and mummy-like statues, which, in their corpse-like immobility, seem struck with eternal death, or in slowly detaching themselves in their vast and unfinished forms from primeval and gigantic rocks, grow into a kind of dull, embryonic, and stagnant life, far more abhorrent than death itself--do we not clearly recognize the idea of the infinite absorbing all things into itself, crushing the soaring spirit of man under a blind fatalism, robbing him of all hope and aim in life, of the dignity of personal effort and moral responsibility, presenting as the only aim of all his glowing desires, the utter absorption of his own individuality in the bosom of the limitless whole--thus reducing the vivid action of his varied life to the stillness of the grave, without its repose?'
It is a strange fact, which we will view more closely when we treat of Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption of the East.
What a step from the vague yet crushing, abstract yet deadening dreaming of a fearful and misinterpreted infinite; from the cruel rigors of an unreasoning and implacable fate--to that full revelation that the Infinite is a _personal_ God, cognizant of the human, gifting it with a free will to choose good or evil, and united with it in mercy and love through the mystic life and still more mystic death of the Divine Redeemer!