What precisely Hegel's view was of the relationship between the Absolute and the finite still remains very much a matter of controversy. Nevertheless, there are two extreme positions which it seems safe to rule out at the outset as clearly un-Hegelian. One position would consider Hegel's Absolute to be wholly unrelated to and unmediated by the finite; the other would equate the Absolute with finite beings in their empirical immediacy. It is well known that for Hegel an infinite being which is merely external to and "beyond" the finite is a "spurious" infinite, the infinite of the "understanding"; such an infinite in fact would be itself as finite as the finite beings to which it would remain external, sheer unsublated (unaufgehobene) externality always implying for Hegel limitation and finitude.1 In this respect Findlay seems quite right in saying that "there never has been a philosopher by whom the Jenseitige, the merely transcendent, has been more thoroughly 'done away with' " than by Hegel.2 It is equally clear that Hegel also rejected both Indian pantheism and Spinozistic acosmism, the former for holding all things to be immediately divine, the latter for holding God alone to be real or to be all.3 This point is admitted even by Gregoire, who would consider Hegel a