Thus the universal is never separated from this ethereal element, from this Unity with itself, this concentration within itself.

IV.—­WHAT IS EVIL?

As the universal, God could not find Himself faced by a contrary whereof the reality should pretend to rise above the phantasmal level.  For this pure unity and this perfect transparency matter is nothing impenetrable, and spirit, the ego, is not so independent as to possess a true, individual, substantiality of its own.

There has been a tendency to label this idea pantheism.  It would be more exact to call it the conception of substantiality.  God is first determined as substance only.  The absolute subject spirit is also substance; but it is determined rather as subject.  This is the difference generally ignored by those who assert that speculative philosophy is pantheism.  As usual, they miss the essential point and disparage philosophy by falsifying it.

Pantheism is commonly taken to mean that God is all things—­the whole, the universe, the collection of all existences, of things infinite and infinitely diverse.  From which notion the charge is brought against philosophy that it teaches that all things are God; that is to say, that God is, not the universal which is in and for itself, but the infinite multiplicity of individual things in their empirical and immediate existence.

If you say God is all that is here, this paper, etc., you have indeed committed yourself to the pantheism with which philosophy is reproached; that is, the whole is understood as equivalent to all individual things.  But there is also the genus, which is equally the universal, yet is wholly different from this totality in which the universal is but the collection of individual things, and the basis, the content, is constituted by these things themselves.  To say that there has ever been a religion which has taught this pantheism is to say what is absolutely untrue.  It has never entered any man’s mind that everything is God; that is to say, that God is things in their individual and contingent existence.  Far less has philosophy ever taught this doctrine.

Spinozism itself, as such, as well as Oriental pantheism, contains this doctrine:  that the divine in all things is no more than that which is universal in their content, their essence; and in such sense that this essence is conceived of as a determinate essence.

When Brahma says, “In the metal I am the brightness of its shining; among the rivers I am the Ganges; I am the life of all that lives,” he thereby suppresses the individual.  He says not, “I am the metal, the rivers, the individual things of various kinds as such, nor in the fashion of their immediate existence.”

Here, at this stage, what is expressed is no longer pantheism; but rather that of the essence in individual things.