The Vedanta philosophy is based on this fundamental principle, and it has been well described as "the most rigorous system of Pantheism which has ever appeared." We learn from the writings of Greece that a similar system prevailed in Egypt, different, indeed, in form, and expressed in other terms, but resting on the same ultimate ground; and we know that Christianity found one of its earliest and most formidable antagonists in the philosophical school of Alexandria, which was deeply imbued with a Pantheistic spirit, and which, perhaps for that reason, has recently become an object of much interest to speculative minds in France and Germany.

The Gnostic and the Neoplatonic sects maintained, and the writings of Plotinus and Proclus still exhibit, many principles the same in substance with those which have been recently revived in Continental Europe.

In the earlier as well as the later literature of Greece we find traces of Pantheism, while the Polytheistic worship, which universally prevailed, was its natural product and appropriate manifestation.

The ancient Orphic doctrines, which were taught in the Mysteries, seem to have been based on the oriental idea of Emanation.

Even in the masculine literature of Rome we find numerous passages which are still quoted, with glowing admiration, by the Pantheists of modern times.[114] There is, indeed, but too much reason to believe that the numerous references which occur in the Classics to the existence of one absolute and supreme Being, and which Dr.Cudworth has so zealously collected, with the view of proving "the naturality of the idea of God," must be interpreted, at least in many instances, in a Pantheistic sense, and that they imply nothing more than the recognition of one parent Substance, from which all other beings have been successively developed.
We find some lingering remains of Pantheism in the writings of the middle age.