Thus the Universal never goes out of this ethereal element of likeness with itself, out of this state in which it is together with or at home with itself. It is not possible that God, as this Universal, can actually exist along with another whose existence is anything more than the mere play of appearance or semblance of existence. In relation to this pure Unity and pure transparency, matter is nothing impenetrable, nor has the spirit, the “I,” such exclusiveness as to possess true substantiality of its own.
c. There has been a tendency to call this idea by the name Pantheism; it would be more correctly designated, “the idea of substantiality.” God is here characterised at first as substance only; the absolute Subject, too, Spirit, remains substance; Spirit is not however substance only, but is also self-determined as Subject. Those who say that speculative philosophy is Pantheism, generally know nothing of this distinction; they overlook the main point, as they always do, and they disparage philosophy by representing it as different from what it really is.
Pantheism, with those who bring this charge against philosophy, has usually been taken to mean that everything, the All, the Universum, this complex collection of all that exists, those infinitely many finite things are God, and philosophy is accused of maintaining that All is God—that is, this infinite manifoldness of single things; not the Universality which has essential being, but the individual things in their empirical existence, as they are immediately.
If it be said, God is all this here, this paper, &c., then that is certainly Pantheism, as understood by those who by way of reproach bring forward the objection to which reference has been made, their meaning being that God is everything, all individual things. If I say “species,” that too is a universality, but of quite another kind than Totality, in which the Universal is thought of
