But we must have a clearer grasp of the difference between this point of view and the earlier. Already in the earlier philosophies we have seen, that νοῦς is the essence of the world, and similarly Aristotle comprehended the whole series of things endued with life and mind in such a way as to recognize the Notion to be the truth of these things. In the case of the Stoics this unity, this system, was most definitely brought forward, while Aristotle rather followed up the particulars. This unity of thought we saw among the Stoics more especially on the one side as the return of self-consciousness into itself, so that spirit through the purity of thought is independent in itself; on the other hand we have seen there an objectivity in which the λόγος became essentially the all-penetrating basis of the whole world. With the Stoics, however, this basis remained as substance only, and thus took on the form of Pantheism, for that is the first idea that we light on when we determine the universal to be the true. Pantheism is the beginning of the elevation of spirit, in that it conceives everything in the world to be a life of the Idea. For when self-consciousness emerges from itself, from its infinitude, from its thought directed on self, and turns to particular things, duties, relationships; or when thought, which thinks this universal substance, passes over from it to the particular, and makes the heavens, the stars, or man its object, it descends from the universal immediately into the particular, or immediately into the finite, since all these are finite forms. But the concrete is the universal which makes itself particular, and in this making of itself particular and finite yet remains eternally at home with itself. In Pantheism, on the contrary, the one universal substance merely makes itself finite, and thereby lowers itself. That is the mode of emanation, according to which the universal, in making itself the particular, or God in creating the world, by becoming particular becomes debased or deteriorated and sets a limit to Himself; so that this making of Himself finite is incompatible with any return into Himself. The same relation is also found in the mythology of the Greeks and Romans; the giving definiteness and form to God, who remains no empty abstraction, is a rendering finite of God, who thus becomes a mere work of art; but the Beautiful itself remains a finite form, which is not brought to such a point as to express the free Idea. The determination, the specialization, the reality of objectivity, must now be of such a nature that it shall be adequate to the absolute universal; the forms of the gods, as also natural forms and the forms which are known as duties, fail to be thus adequate.