Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 3.djvu/332

 and this finitude is not thought of as something which disappears and is absorbed in this unity with the Divine, but is still preserved by them in it as existing. On the other hand, since the finite is, as they say, robbed of its infinitude by Pantheism, the finite has in consequence no longer any Being at all.

It is preferable to use the expression, “the philosophical systems of substantiality,” and not to speak of systems of Pantheism, because of the false idea associated with this term. We may take the Eleatic system in general as representing these in ancient times, and the Spinozistic as their modern representative. These systems of substantiality are, as we have seen, more logical than the religions corresponding to them, since they keep within the sphere of metaphysical abstraction. The one aspect of the defect which attaches to them is represented by the one-sidedness referred to as existing in the idea formed by the Understanding of the course taken by the spirit’s elevation to God. That is to say, they start from actual existence, treat it as a nullity, and recognise the Absolute One as the truth of this existence. They start with a presupposition, they negate it in the absolute unity, but they don’t get out of this unity back to the presupposition. They don’t think of the world, which is considered to be merely comprised within an abstraction of contingency, of the many and so on, as produced out of Substance. Everything passes into this unity as into a kind of eternal night, while this unity is not characterised as a principle which moves itself to its manifestation, or produces it, “as the unmoved which moves,” according to the profound expression of Aristotle.

(a.) In these systems the Absolute, or God, is defined as the One, Being, the Being in all existence, the absolute Substance, the Essence which is necessary not through an Other, but in-and-for-itself, the Causa Sui, the cause of itself, and consequently its own effect, that is, the mediation which cancels itself. The unity implied in