Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/330

 transitory and temporary; or, what comes to the same thing, all life, whether in the form of spiritual or natural individuality, is torn away from the finitude of its perfectly conditioned connection—all understanding in this latter being destroyed—and is elevated into the form of divine existence.

As we were reminded, the principle of individualisation appears in this Pantheism in its several religious shapes, in a form inconsistent with the force of substantial unity. Individuality, it is true, does not exactly get the length of being personality, but the force unfolds itself in a sufficiently wild way as an illogical transition into its opposite. We find ourselves in a region of unbridled madness in which the present in its most ordinary form is directly elevated to the rank of something divine, and Substance is conceived of as existing in finite shapes, while the shapes assumed have a volatile character and directly melt away.

The Oriental theory of the universe is in general represented by this idea of sublimity which puts all individualisation into special shapes, and infinitely extends all particular forms of existence and particular interests. It beholds the One in all things, and consequently clothes this purely abstract One in all the glory and splendour of the natural and spiritual universe. The souls of the Eastern Poets dive into this ocean and drown in it all the necessities, the aims, the cares of this petty circumscribed life, and revel in the enjoyment of this freedom, upon which they lavish by way of ornament and adornment all the beauty of the world.

It will be already clear from this picture, and this is a point upon which I have elsewhere explained my views, that the expression Pantheism, or rather the German expression in which it appears in a somewhat transposed form, that God is the One and All, or everything—τὸ ἓν καὶ πᾶν—leads to the false idea that in pantheistic religion or in philosophy, everything (Alles),