26 / CHRONICLESnReenchanting the World by Herbert Schlossbergn”Do not seek to become a god. “nUnmasking the New Age by DouglasnR. Groothius, Downers Grove, IL:nInterVarsity Press; $6.95.nUnholy Spirits: Occultism and NewnAge Humanism by Gary North, Ft.nWorth, TX: Dominion Press;n$19.95.nOnce we begin to see that wenare all God, that we all haventhe attributes of God, then Inthink the whole purpose ofnhuman life is to reown thenGodlikeness within us; thenperfect love, the perfectnwisdom, the perfectnunderstanding, the perfectnintelligence, and when we donthat, we create back to that old,nthat essential oneness which isnconsciousness.nThis is the religious philosophnbeing taught to students in thenLos Angeles public schools, as part of anFederally funded project. Where is thenACLU now that we need it?nKant has few readers outside of universitynphilosophy departments, butnhis influence obviously extends to LosnAngeles. Part of Kant’s legacy to thenmodern world is the iron curtain thatnseals off all reality into two compartments:nthat which can be known bynthe senses—phenomena—and thatnwhich cannot be known by the sensesn—noumena. The latter includes thenobjects we normally associate with thenreligious: God, spirit, immortal soul,nand so on. One of the unintendedneffects of this effort was to provide annexcuse for ignoring the noumenalnworld. What modern man cannotnknow through the senses, he feels safenin dismissing from further considerahon.nOne of the first and most notablencasualties of this reasoning is the ideanof purpose. The senses are silent onnHerbert Schlossberg, author of Idolsnfor Destruehon (Thomas Nelson,n1983), lives in Minneapolis.n-Pindarnsuch topics. The response of Nietzschenand the existenhalists was a sometimesnstoical despair. The naive managed tonkeep up the cheerful scientism thatncharacterizes the work of scientificnpublicists like Isaac Asimov and CarlnSagan, but the official grin of 19thcenturynoptimism is beginning to resemblenthe rictus of a corpse.nCoexisting with such thinkingnthroughout much of the last centuryand-a-half,nespecially in Europe, wasnnnthe. philosophv of Hegel. His allpervadingnspirit was a sophisticatedncontra-Kantian development of whatnAldous Huxley called the “perennialnphilosophy.” Thus pantheism was thenreligion—often unacknowledged—ofna great many of those in the 19thcenturynintellectual classes who didnnot subscribe to scientism. Ernst Troeltsch,nearly in this century, surveyednthe German Protestant church andnfound it to be largely pantheist inn