  Although not all pantheists ascribe intrinsic value to the cosmos as a whole, insofar as they do, that might be thought give rise to something of a puzzle. For if God is valuable and God is identical to the universe then we might seem committed to the somewhat implausible thought that everything in the universe is equally valuable; a leveling off which gave rise to Coleridge’s complaint that ‘everything God’ and ‘no God’ are in effect identical positions (Coleridge 1839, 224). The pantheist need not be committed to this view, however, for the fact that a certain feature or element is present in everything by no means entails that it is equally present in everything. Although the universe as a whole may be divine, there is no need to regard each bit of it as uniformly divine; no need (for example) to feel quite the same about the loss of biological species as we do about the disappearance of human cultures and languages. Historically, there have been two main ways in which pantheists have regarded the distribution of value in the universe.