Karl Christian Friedrich Krause was a German philosopher whose views on the nature of God held considerable influence, especially in Spain, where his followers were known as
krausistas. Krause’s goal was to reconcile pantheism and theism by developing “panentheism”—the idea that God is an essence that contains the entire universe within itself but is not exhausted by it. Pantheism and panentheism held much sway with the New England Transcendentalists, even though these terms were used in contempt against them by Calvinist trinitarians as well as by orthodox Unitarians.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem “Brahma,” for example, owes much to these ideas: “all is one stuff, cooked and painted under many counterfeit appearances.”