But to go back again to the question of fact. If we want to see the
consciousness of the One—not as with the Hindoos split between the
featureless unity of abstract thought, on one hand, and on the other, the
long-winded weary story of its particular detail, but—in its finest purity
and sublimity, we must consult the Mohammedans. If e.g. in the excellent
Jelaleddin-Rumi in particular, we find the unity of the soul with the One
set forth, and that unity described as love, this spiritual unity is an
exaltation above the finite and vulgar, a transfiguration of the natural
and the spiritual, in which the externalism and transitoriness of
immediate nature, and of empirical secular spirit, is discarded and
absorbed(174).
I refrain from accumulating further examples of the religious and poetic
conceptions which it is customary to call pantheistic. Of the philosophies
to which that name is given, the Eleatic, or Spinozist, it has been
remarked earlier (§ 50, note) that so far are they from identifying God
with the world and making him finite, that in these systems this
“everything” has no truth, and that we should rather call them
monotheistic, or, in relation to the popular idea of the world, acosmical.
They are most accurately called systems which apprehend the Absolute only
as substance. Of the oriental, especially the Mohammedan, modes of
envisaging God, we may rather say that they represent the Absolute as the
utterly universal genus which dwells in the species or existences, but
dwells so potently that these existences have no actual reality. The fault
of all these modes of thought and systems is that they stop short of
defining substance as subject and as mind.