Note 76 — Chapter VI · THE STUDY OF NATURE. FUNDAMENTAL POSITIONS.

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.76 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.77