changing into particular elements, and from them returning to itself again, which regarded in its real form as God includes at one time everything, at another only a part of real existence. [327] [C. Pantheism.] [(1) God identical with the world.] From what has been said it follows that the Stoics admitted no essential difference between God and the world. Their system was therefore strictly pantheistic. The world is the sum of all real existence, and all real existence is originally contained in deity, which is at once the matter of everything and the creative force which moulds this matter into particular individual substances. We can, therefore, think of nothing which is not either immediately deity or a manifestation of deity. In point of essence, therefore, God and the world are the same; indeed, the two conceptions are declared by the Stoics to be absolutely identical. [328] If they have nevertheless to be distinguished, the distinction is only derivative and partial. The same universal Being is called God when it is regarded as a whole, World when it is regarded as progressive in one of the many forms assumed in the course of its development. The difference, therefore, is tantamount to assigning a difference of meaning to the term world, according as it is used to express the whole of what exists, or only the derivative part. [329] [(2) Difference between God and the world only relative.] Still this distinction does not depend only upon our way of looking at things, but it is founded in the nature of things. Primary force, as such, primary fire, primary reason, constitute what is primarily God. Things into which this primary substance has changed itself are only divine in a derivative sense. Hence deity, which is ultimately identical with the whole of the world, may again be described as a part of the world, as the leading part (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν), as the Soul of the world, as the all-pervading fiery Breath. [330] The distinction, however, is only a relative one. What is not immediately divine is nevertheless divine derivatively, as being a manifestation of primary fire; and if the soul of the world is not identical with the body, at least it pervades every part of that body. [331] It is a distinction, too, which applies only to a part of the conditions of the world. At the end of every period, the sum of all derivative things reverts to the unity of the divine Being, and the distinction between what is originally and what is derivatively divine, in other words, the distinction between God and the world, ceases. [(3) Boëthus dissents from the pantheism of the Stoics.]