pose personality. Not being intelligent, it does not act with an end in view; it is the efficient cause of things. "I confess," says Spinoza, "that the view which subjects all things to the indifferent will of God, and makes them all depend on his caprice (Descartes, the Jesuits, and the Scotists), comes nearer the truth than the view of those who maintain that God acts in all things with a view to the good (sub ratione boni). For these latter persons — Plato, for example- seem to set up something outside of God, which does not depend on God, but to which God, in acting, looks as a model, or at which he aims as a goal. This surely is only another way of subjecting God to fate, and is a most absurd view of God, whom we have shown to be the first and only free cause of the essence and the existence of all things."1

Though Spinoza calls God the cause of the universe, he takes the word "cause" in a very different sense from its usual meaning. His idea of cause is identical with his notion of substance; his conception of effect, with that of accident, mode, modification. God, according to him, is the cause of the universe as the apple is the cause of its red color, as milk is the cause of whiteness, sweetness, and liquidness, and not as the father is the cause of the child's existence, or even as the sun is the cause of heat. The father is the external and transient cause of his son, who has a separate existence of his own. So, too, heat, though connected with the sun, has an existence apart from the star producing it: it exists alongside of and outside of the sun. The case is not the same with God as related to the world; he is not its transcendent and transient cause, but the immanent cause; 2 i. e., if we understand Spinoza correctly, God is not the cause of the world in the proper and usual sense of the term, a cause acting from without and creating it once for all, but the permanent substratum 1 Eth., I., Prop. 33, Scholium, 2. 2 Id., I., Prop. 18.

of things, the innermost substance of the universe. God is neither the temporal creator of the world, as dualism and Christianity conceive him, nor even its father, as Cabalistic and Gnostic speculation assumes; he is the universe itself, considered SUB SPECIE ÆTERNITATIS, the eternal universe. The words God and universe designate one and the same thing: Nature, which is both the source of all beings (natura naturans sive Deus) and the totality of these beings considered as its effects (natura naturata).

In short, Spinoza is neither an acosmist nor an atheist, but a cosmotheist or pantheist in the strict sense of the word; that is to say, his cosmos is God himself, and his God the cosmical substance.

2. Theory of Attributes

Substance consists of infinite attributes, each of which expresses in its way the essence of God.2 The human intellect knows two of these: extension and thought. The cosmic substance is an extended and thinking thing; it forms both the substance of all bodies, or matter, and the substance of all minds. Matter and mind are not two opposite substances, as in Cartesianism; they are two different ways of conceiving one and the same substance, two different names for one and the same thing. Each of the attributes of the substance is relatively infinite. The substance is absolutely infinite in the sense that there is nothing beyond it: the attribute is only relatively infinite, that is, after its kind. Extension is infinite as such, and thought is infinite as such; but neither extension nor thought is absolutely infinite, for alongside of extension there is thought,

1 Hence, the Spinozistic conception of immanency implies both permanency and, if we may use the term, interiority; that is to say, the immanent God is both the inner and the permanent cause of the universe.

2 Eth., I., Def. 6.

4 Id., I., Def. 6, Explanation.

8 Id., II., Props. 1 and 2.

and alongside of thought there is extension, not counting such attributes of substance as are unknown to us. Substance as such is the sum of all existing things; extension, though infinite as extension, does not contain all existences in itself, since there are, in addition to it, infinite thought and the minds constituted by it; nor does thought embrace the totality of beings, since there are, besides, extension and bodies.

It seems difficult, at first sight, to reconcile the theory of substance with the theory of attributes. According to the former, substance is ens absolute indeterminatum; according to the latter, it has attributes and even an infinity of attributes. Hence, Spinoza's God seems to be both an unqualified being and an infinitely-qualified being. It has been suggested that Spinoza, like the Neo-Platonic philosophers and the Jewish theologians who do not apply attributes to God, may have meant by attributes, not qualities inherent in God, the supra-rational, incomprehensible, and indefinable being, but the different ways according to which the understanding conceives God, i. e., purely subjective and human ways of thinking and speaking. An attribute would then mean: what the human understanding attributes, ascribes, and, as it were, adds to God, and not what is really and objectively (or as Spinoza would say, formally) in God; and substance would be conceived as an extended and thinking thing, without really being so. Spinoza's definition of attribute (id quod intellectus de substantia percipit TANQUAM ejusdem essentiam constituens) is more favorable to this interpretation than one would suppose. In our opinion it signifies that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting the essence of it; but it might also mean: that which the intellect perceives of substance as though it constituted its essence.1 However, if the second interpre

1 [The difference between the two interpretations may be more clearly stated as follows: Some construe the participle constituens as

tation were the correct one, Spinoza could not have said that the substance is an extended and thinking thing, nor, above all, that we have an adequate idea of it. Besides, it is wholly unnecessary to translate the passage in the subjectivistic and "non-attributistic" sense, simply in order to reconcile the seemingly contradictory theses of Spinoza. In fact, the contradiction is purely imaginary and arises from a misconception. The celebrated determinatio negatio est1 does not signify: determination is negation, but: limitation is negation. By calling God ens absolute indeterminatum, Spinoza does not mean to say that God is an absolutely indeterminate being, or non-being, or negative being, but, on the contrary, that he has absolutely unlimited attributes, or absolutely infinite perfections, that he is a positive, concrete, most real being, the being who unites in himself all possible attributes and possesses them without limitation.

Spinoza evidently intended to forestall the objections of the non-attributists 2 by ascribing to God infinita attributa, which seems to mean both infinite attributes and an infinity of attributes. God is therefore no longer conceived as having separate attributes, which would make him a particular being; he is the being who combines in himself all possible attributes, or the totality of being. Now each divine attribute constitutes a world: extension, the mate

agreeing with quod, while others refer it to intellectus. According to the latter (formalistic) view, which is accepted by Hegel and Ed. Erdmann, the attributes are mere modes of human thinking, they are merely in intellectu, not extra intellectum, not realities in God. According to the former (realistic) explanation given by K. Fischer and others, the attributes are not merely modes or forms of thought, but expressions of God's nature. They are not merely in the human mind but in God. God is equal to all his attributes. See Kuno Fischer's discussion of the point in his Geschichte der neuern Philosophie, I., 2, Book III., chap. III., 3. — TR.]

1 Letter L.

* Who maintain that to give attributes to God means to limit him.

rial world; thought, the spiritual world. Hence, we must conclude from the infinite number of divine attributes that there exists an infinite number of worlds besides the two worlds known to us, - worlds which are neither material nor spiritual, and have no relation to space or time, but depend on other conditions of existence absolutely inaccessible to the human understanding. This conception opens an immense field to the imagination, without being absolutely contrary to reason. However, it must be added, strictly speaking: infinita attributa are boundless attributes rather than innumerable attributes. Had Spinoza been decided on the question as to whether the absolute has attributes other than extension and thought, he would evidently not have employed an ambiguous expression. In fact, his substance has extension and thought only, but it has them in infinite degree.

Let us point out another difficulty. Spinoza holds that God has neither intelligence nor will; yet he attributes thought to him, and speaks of the infinite intelligence of God. These two assertions seem to contradict each other flatly. But we must remember that according to Jewish and Catholic theology (and Descartes himself), God has not discursive understanding, which needs reasoning and analysis in order to arrive at its ends; they attribute to him intuitive understanding, the vous TOINTIKós of Aristotle. We must remember, above all, that Spinoza's God is not the "author of nature," but nature itself. Now there is indeed reason in nature, but it is unconscious. The spider weaves its web without the slightest notion of geometry; the animal organism develops without having the faintest conception of physiology and anatomy. Nature thinks without thinking that it thinks; its thought is unconscious, an instinct, a wonderful foresight which is superior to intelligence, but not intelligence proper. By distinguishing be

1 Letters LXVI. and LXVII