Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 1.djvu/350

 and all limitation, all reality, all definite modes of existence come to be included in Not-Being; this latter, accordingly, is not at all, but it has Being only. With Parmenides that which is known as determinate Being is no longer present or existent at all. By Jacobi, on the contrary, determinate Being is regarded as affirmative, although it is finite, and thus it is affirmation in finite existence. Spinoza says, What is is the absolute substance; what is other than this are mere modi, to which he ascribes no affirmation, no reality. Thus it cannot perhaps be said even of the Substance of Spinoza that it is so precisely Pantheistic as that expression of Jacobi, for particular things still remain as little an affirmative for Spinoza as determinate Being does for Parmenides, which, as distinguished from Being, is for him mere Not-Being, and is of such a character that this Not-Being is not at all.

If the finite be taken as thought, then all that is finite is understood to be included, and thus it is Pantheism. But in using the term finite it is necessary to draw a distinction between the finite as represented merely by this or that particular object, and the finite as including all things, and to explain in which sense we use the word. Taken in the latter sense, it is already a progressive movement of reflection, which no longer arrests itself at the Particular; “all that is finite” pertains to reflection. This Pantheism is of modern date, and if it be said that “God is Being in all determinate Being,” this expresses a form of Pantheism found among Mohammedans of modern times, especially the Pantheism of the Dechelaleddin-Rumi. Here this everything as it is is a Whole, and is God; and the finite is in this determinate Being as universal finitude. This Pantheism is the product of thinking reflection, which extends natural things so as to include all and everything, and in so doing conceives of the existence of God not as true universality of thought, but as an allness; that is to say, as being in all individual natural existences.