Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/66

 unity, of the absolute Substance and the activity of this Substance within itself, an activity in which all that is particular, that is individual, is merely something transient, vanishing, and does not represent true independence.

This Oriental conception stands in contrast to that of the West, in which man, like the sun, sets into himself, into his subjectivity. Here individuality is the leading category, the fact, namely, that it is the individual which is independent. As with the Orientals it is the Universal which is the truly independent, so in this form of consciousness we find the singularity or individuality of things, of mankind, occupying the foremost place; indeed, the Occidental mode of conception is capable of going so far as to assert that finite things are independent, that is to say, absolute.

The expression Pantheism has the same ambiguity which attaches to Universality. “Ἕν καὶ Πᾶν means the One All, the All, which remains absolutely One; but Πᾶν means also Everything, and thus it is that it passes over into that idea which is devoid of thought, and is a poor and unphilosophical one.

Thus Pantheism is understood as meaning the divine nature of all things, not the divine nature of all: for in the case of all being deified, if God were All, there is only one God; in the All, particular things are absorbed, and are merely shadows, phantoms; they come and go, the very nature of their being is to vanish.

Philosophy is, moreover, asked to confess that it is Pantheism in the first of these two senses, and it is theologians especially who use this kind of language.

The ambiguity of Universality is precisely the same. If it be taken in the sense of the universality of reflection, it is in that case allness; and in the next place, this is taken to mean that individuality remains independent. But the Universality of Thought, the substantial universality, is unity with itself, in which all that is