Hegel's Philosophy of Mind · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
XV.
Life shrinks from Death in woe and fear, Though Death ends well Life’s bitter need: So shrinks the heart when Love draws near, As though ’twere Death in very deed: For wheresoever Love finds room, There Self, the sullen tyrant, dies. So let him perish in the gloom,— Thou to the dawn of freedom rise. In this poetry, which soars over all that is external and sensuous, who would recognise the prosaic ideas current about so-called pantheism—ideas which let the divine sink to the external and the sensuous? The copious extracts which Tholuck, in his work _Anthology from the Eastern Mystics_, gives us from the poems of Jelaleddin and others, are made from the very point of view now under discussion. In his Introduction, Herr Tholuck proves how profoundly his soul has caught the note of mysticism; and there, too, he points out the characteristic traits of its oriental phase, in distinction from that of the West and Christendom. With all their divergence, however, they have in common the mystical character. The conjunction of Mysticism with so-called Pantheism, as he says (p. 53), implies that inward quickening of soul and spirit which inevitably tends to annihilate that external _Everything_, which Pantheism is usually held to adore. But beyond that, Herr Tholuck leaves matters standing at the usual indistinct conception of Pantheism; a profounder discussion of it would have had, for the author’s emotional Christianity, no direct interest; but we see that personally he is carried away by remarkable enthusiasm for a mysticism which, in the ordinary phrase, entirely deserves the epithet Pantheistic. Where, however, he tries philosophising (p. 12), he does not get beyond the standpoint of the “rationalist” metaphysic with its uncritical categories.
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