Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/108

 This Universality is thus to be understood as the absolutely full, filled up universality, and when we thus say that God is universal, concrete, full of content, we imply that God is One only, and not one as contrasted with many Gods, but that there is only the One, that is, God.

Existing things, the developments of the natural and spiritual world, take manifold forms, and have an infinite variety; they have a being which differs in degree, force, strength, content; but the being of all these things is not independent, but is supported by, dependent on, something else, and has no true independence. If we attribute a being to particular things, it is only a borrowed being, only the semblance of a being, not the absolute self-sustained Being, which is God.

God in His universality, this Universal, in which there is no limitation, no finiteness, no particularity, is the absolute Self-subsisting Being, and the only Self-subsisting Being; and what subsists has its root, its subsistence, in this One alone.

If the substantial element in this its first form is understood in this sense, we may express ourselves thus: God is the absolute Substance, the only true reality. All else, which is real, is not real in itself, has no real existence of itself; the one absolute reality is God alone, and thus He is the absolute Substance.

If this conception is held to in this abstract fashion, it is undoubtedly Spinozism. Substantiality, Substance as such, is as yet not at all differentiated from subjectivity. But the following thought also forms part of the presupposition thus made. God is Spirit, the Absolute Spirit, the eternally undifferentiated Spirit, essentially at home with Himself; this ideality, this subjectivity of Spirit, which is, so to speak, transparency, pure ideality excluding all that is particular, is just the Universality spoken of above, that pure relation to self, what is and remains absolutely at home with itself.

If we use the expression “Substance,” it is implied