Why immanentism is not an uncontested synonym for pantheism
a certain modern attitude which is often called immanentism
R. J. Campbell gives a concrete meaning to the terminology: Chesterton names him later in this chapter. In chapter III of The New Theology (first published 1907; inspected in Project Gutenberg’s transcription of the New York Macmillan edition, April 1907 reprint), Campbell represents individual selves as expressions of a universal divine consciousness. But he rejects the label pantheism when it means an unconscious, necessitated deity, and says individual self-knowledge will survive its expansion into the whole. Campbell, chapter III, including ‘The Self is God’.
Chesterton’s corrective ‘or rather’ therefore matters: he is identifying a modern tendency for criticism, not reporting an uncontested classification. The distinction is not merely verbal. A conscious divine whole and a blind necessity need not imply the same account of agency, while the claim that personal knowledge survives unity needs to be tested separately from either label. Campbell is a relevant interlocutor, but the comparison does not establish that this paragraph quotes him directly.
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