 (4) Teleological Identity. Religious world views in which it is the ultimate destiny or purpose of the cosmos to achieve oneness with or to fully express deity provide a fourth model for understanding pantheistic claims of identity. The true identity of the universe is that which is revealed at the end of all things. For example, on the Absolute Idealist scheme, history culminates in the complete realization of God or Absolute spirit in the world and so, as Schelling put it, in the last days “God will indeed be all in all, and pantheism will be true” (Schelling 1810, 484). A rather different example of this type of thinking is that of Samuel Alexander who thinks that the universe evolves in a steadily progressive manner and will finally ‘attain deity’, where deity is thought of as an unknown but superior quality that will ‘emerge’ from the complex whole in rather the same way as, at a lower level, consciousness ‘emerges’ from complex organisations of organic matter. By way of objection to such teleological conception of identity it might be challenged that something can only become merged with God, or become God, if it is now different from God. But against this it could be replied that, if the notion of teleology be taken seriously, a thing more truly is what it is destined to become than what it currently seems to be, for everything about it is to be explained in terms of its telos or goal. It may also be responded that anything which can be converted into God cannot be finally different from God. Hence Alexander, for example, is clear that since all potentiality must be grounded in some actuality there is also a sense in which the universe is already implicitly God: “God as actually possessing deity does not exist but is an ideal, is always becoming; but God as the whole universe tending towards deity does exist” (Alexander 1921, 428).