Oliver Wendell Holmes when he taught anatomy at the Harvard Medical School in the 19th century used to begin his lecture on the skull by picking up each bone and describing its position: “The frontal bone borders on the parietal bone, the parietal bone borders on the occipital bone,” and so on, until he came to the sphenoid bone, a bone composed of many pieces that seem to border on everything and assume all shapes. He is supposed to have picked up the sphenoid and said in annoyance, “Gentlemen, curse the sphenoid bone!” No such uncharitable words would come from the student of Iran, but how often the primitive state of his science, like the anatomy of an earlier century, makes Iran seem the most complex and indefinable of all the bones in the greater body politic of the world.

Pantheism is generally defined as “all is God and God is all (I) but it can therotically assume two different forms. First, it is said that the finite and temporal world is nothing in front of God, and it is swallowad up by the sole absolute Reality of God, or in the second instance, God is considered as dissolved in the world, poetically sung or scientifically demonstrated as a Whole, in which an immanent Life-Energy acts. In both cases, however, what most sharply distinguishes pantheism from non-pantheism (or theism) is the fact that God is always considered by pantheists as something impersonal; pantheists generally affirm the superiority of their view on theistic “inferior” forms of religion pointing out that (a) calling God a “person” restricts and diminishes His greatness, as it necessarily implies a body and a limitation, (b) pantheistic piety is not a feeling of devotion of an Ego to a Thou, but rather the sensation of being a part belonging to a Whole, a wave in the immense sea of Being.