This it is which constitutes the real meaning of pantheism, and we shall only have occasion now to employ the expression in this sense. It applies first and foremost to the Orient, whose type of conception is based on the thought of an absolute unity of Godhead and of everything else as subsisting in this Unity. As such Unity and All the Divine can only be presented to consciousness by means of the ever recurrent evanescence of the limited number of particular objects, in which its Presence is expressed. On the one hand we have here the Divine envisaged as immanent in the most diverse objects, whether it be life or death, mountain or sea, and with still closer intimacy no doubt as the most excellent and pre-eminent among and in all determinate existence. On the other hand, inasmuch as the One is this and again that other and that other beyond it, and in short is discharged into everything, all particular existence appears for that reason to be a thing which is cancelled and vanishes, for no particular is alone this One, but this One is this manifold of particulars which pass away before semi-perception, as such particulars into the universe which comprises them. For if the One is Life, it is also at another point Death, and is to that extent not merely life, so that it is neither as life nor the sun nor the sea that these or any other objective realities constitute the Divine and One. At the same time we do not find here, as in the genuine type of the Sublime, that the accidental is expressly posited in the negative relation of mere service. So far from this being so, substance is essentially identified with one particular and accidental existence, inasmuch as it is this One in everything. Conversely, however, this very particular, because it is equally subject to change, and the imagination does not restrict substance to one definite existence, but moves over every definition, letting it fall that it may advance to another, is thereby relegated in its turn to the accidental, over which the One is superposed in the sublimity thus conjoined with it.
Such a way of viewing existence therefore can only be expressed in art through poetry; the plastic arts are closed to it, inasmuch as they bring before the vision the definite and particular, which in their contrast to the substance present in the objects of Nature has to be given up in a determinate and persistent form. Where we find pantheism in its purity no plastic art is found as a mode of its presentation.