The distinction between the world and God as the creator of the world is therefore only a formal one. The nature of God--for the divine understanding, that which comprehends within itself all things, is the divine nature itself; hence God, inasmuch as he thinks and knows himself, thinks and knows at the same time the world and all things--the nature of God is nothing else than the abstract, thought nature of the world; the nature of the world nothing else than the real, concrete, perceptible nature of God. Hence creation is nothing more than a formal act; for that which, before the creation, was an object of thought, of the understanding, is by creation simply made an object of sense, its ideal contents continuing the same; although it remains absolutely inexplicable how a real material thing can spring out of a pure thought. [61] So it is with plurality and difference--if we reduce the world to these abstract categories--in opposition to the unity and identity of the Divine nature. Real difference can be derived only from a being which has a principle of difference in itself. But I posit difference in the original being, because I have originally found difference as a positive reality. Wherever difference is in itself nothing, there also no difference is conceived in the principle of things. I posit difference as an essential category, as a truth, where I derive it from the original being, and vice versâ: the two propositions are identical. The rational expression is this: Difference lies as necessarily in the reason as identity.