r us, in relation to
development, Being enclosed in itself, Being at unity with itself. When
we say God is Being enclosed in itself, we enunciate a proposition which
is bound to a development which we await. But this envelopment of God in
Himself which we have called His universality we must not conceive,
relatively to God Himself and His content, as an abstract universality,
outside of which, and as opposed to which, the particular has an
independent existence.

So we must consider this universal as an absolutely concrete universal.
This sense of fulness is the sense in which God is one, and there is but
one God--that is to say, God is not one merely by contrast with other
gods, but because it is He that is the One, that is, God.

The things which are, the developments of the worlds of nature and of
mind, show a multiplicity of forms and an infinite variety of
existences. But whatever may be their difference of degree, of force, of
content, these things have no true independence; their being is
consequent, and, so to speak, contingent. When we predicate being of
particular things, it is not of Being which is absolute that we
speak--Being of and from itself; that is, God--but a borrowed being, a
semblance of being.

God in His universality--that is, this universal Being which has no
limit, no bounds, no particularity--is a Being which subsists
absolutely, and which subsists alone; all else which subsists has its
root in this unity, and by this alone subsists. In thus representing to
ourselves this first content we may say that God is absolute substance,
the only veritable reality. For not everything which has a reality has a
reality of its own, or subsists by itself. God is the only absolute
reality, and thereby the absolute substance.

If we stop at this abstract thought we have Spinozism, for in Spinozism
subjectivity is not yet differentiated from substantiality, from
substance as such. But in the presupposition just made there is also
this thought--God is spirit, absolute and eternal; spirit which comes
not forth from itself in differentiation. This ideality, this
subjectivity of spirit, which is transparency, ideality excluding all
particular determination, is precisely the universal, pure relation to
self, Being which remains absolutely within itself.

If we halt at substance, we fail to grasp this universal under its
concrete form. In its concrete determination spirit always preserves its
unity, this unity