Panteista spinoza biography

That same year he fled to the Hague, fearing persecution at the hands of a repressive faction led by the Prince of Orange. He continued, nonetheless, to work closely with the Dutch mathematician and scientist Christiaan Huygens, who published major studies in mechanics, optics, astronomy, and probability. Spinoza died in relative peace in and was buried at the Hague.

It is hard to imagine a more passionate and reasoned defense of freedom and toleration than that offered by Spinoza. Note: There is an enormous body of literature on Spinoza in many languages, especially French, Italian, Dutch and German. There is also the irregularly published series Studia Spinozana , each volume of which contains essays by scholars devoted to a particular theme.

Biography 2. Ethics 2. Theological-Political Treatise 3. Ethics The Ethics is an ambitious and multifaceted work. Proposition 1 : A substance is prior in nature to its affections. Proposition 6 : One substance cannot be produced by another substance. Proposition 7 : It pertains to the nature of a substance to exist. Proposition 8 : Every substance is necessarily infinite.

Proposition 14 : Except God, no substance can be or be conceived. Ip29 : In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way. All the prejudices I here undertake to expose depend on this one: that men commonly suppose that all natural things act, as men do, on account of an end; indeed, they maintain as certain that God himself directs all things to some certain end, for they say that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God.

I, Appendix God is not some goal-oriented planner who then judges things by how well they conform to his purposes. I, Appendix A judging God who has plans and acts purposively is a God to be obeyed and placated. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance for often many circumstances do concur at once?

Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on—for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing?

And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i. I, Appendix This is strong language, and Spinoza is clearly aware of the risks of his position. As he explains, A circle existing in nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes.

Therefore, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of Extension, or under the attribute of Thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find one and the same order, or one and the same connection of causes, i. Indeed they seem to conceive man in nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself.

III, Preface Descartes, for example, believed that if the freedom of the human being is to be preserved, the soul must be exempt from the kind of deterministic laws that rule over the material universe. Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same, i. So the way of understanding the nature of anything, of whatever kind, must also be the same, viz.

We conceive things as actual in two ways: either insofar as we conceive them to exist in relation to a certain time and place, or insofar as we conceive them to be contained in God and to follow from the necessity of the divine nature. But the things we conceive in this second way as true, or real, we conceive under a species of eternity, and to that extent they involve the eternal and infinite essence of God.

Vp29s But this is just to say that, ultimately, we strive for a knowledge of God. The more this knowledge that things are necessary is concerned with singular things, which we imagine more distinctly and vividly, the greater is this power of the Mind over the affects, as experience itself also testifies. For we see that Sadness over some good which has perished is lessened as soon as the man who has lost it realizes that this good could not, in any way, have been kept.

Similarly, we see that [because we regard infancy as a natural and necessary thing], no one pities infants because of their inability to speak, to walk, or to reason, or because they live so many years, as it were, unconscious of themselves. Vp6s Our affects or emotions themselves can be understood in this way, which further diminishes their power over us.

Nevertheless, we shall bear calmly those things that happen to us contrary to what the principle of our advantage demands, if we are conscious that we have done our duty, that the power we have could not have extended itself to the point where we could have avoided those things, and that we are a part of the whole of nature, whose order we follow.

If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part of us which is defined by understanding, i. For insofar as we understand, we can want nothing except what is necessary, nor absolutely be satisfied with anything except what is true. I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture is no different from the method of interpreting Nature, and is in fact in complete accord with it.

For the method of interpreting Nature consists essentially in composing a detailed study of Nature from which, as being the source of our assured data, we can deduce the definitions of the things of Nature. Now in exactly the same way the task of Scriptural interpretation requires us to make a straightforward study of Scripture, and from this, as the source of our fixed data and principles, to deduce by logical inference the meaning of the authors of Scripture.

In this way—that is, by allowing no other principles or data for the interpretation of Scripture and study of its contents except those that can be gathered only from Scripture itself and from a historical study of Scripture—steady progress can be made without any danger of error, and one can deal with matters that surpass our understanding with no less confidence than those matters that are known to us by the natural light of reason.

TTP, chap. As to the question of what God, the exemplar of true life, really is, whether he is fire, or spirit, or light, or thought, or something else, this is irrelevant to faith. And so likewise is the question as to why he is the exemplar of true life, whether this is because he has a just and merciful disposition, or because all things exist and act through him and consequently we, too, understand through him, and through him we see what is true, just and good.

On these questions it matters not what beliefs a man holds.

Panteista spinoza biography

Nor, again, does it matter for faith whether one believes that God is omnipresent in essence or in potency, whether he directs everything from free will or from the necessity of his nature, whether he lays down laws as a rule or teaches them as being eternal truths, whether man obeys God from free will or from the necessity of the divine decree, whether the rewarding of the good and the punishing of the wicked is natural or supernatural.

The view one takes on these and similar questions has no bearing on faith, provided that such a belief does not lead to the assumption of greater license to sin, or hinders submission to God. Indeed … every person is in duty bound to adapt these religious dogmas to his own understanding and to interpret them for himself in whatever way makes him feel that he can the more readily accept them with full confidence and conviction.

Abbreviated in SEP entry as G. This edition, by the Groupe de recherches spinoziste, is superseding the Gebhardt edition. As of October , four volumes have appeared: I. Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ; IV. Ethica ; and V. The Ethics is in vol. Allison, Henry, Balibar, Etienne, Spinoza and Politics , London: Verso. Bennett, Jonathan, Carlisle, Clare.

Princeton: Princeton University Press. Curley, Edwin, Della Rocca, Michael, Spinoza , London and New York: Routledge. The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza. Donagan, Alan, Spinoza , Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York: Routledge. Garrett, Don ed.

Goff, Philip ed. Huenemann, Charlie ed. Israel, Jonathan I. Spinoza: Life and Legacy. Jaquet, Chantal, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. James, Susan, Kisner, Matthew J. Koistinen, Olli ed. Koistinen, Olli and John Biro eds. Laerke, Mogens, Spinoza and the Freedom of Philosophizing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LeBuffe, Michael, Lin, Martin, Lord, Beth, Marshall, Eugene, Melamed, Yitzhak, Melamed, Yitzhak and Michael A.

Rosenthal eds. Nadler, Steven, []. Newlands, Sam, Popkin, Richard, Spinoza , Oxford: One World. Preus, J. Samuel, Ravven, Heidi and Leonard E. Goodman eds. Sangiacomo, Andrea, Smith, Steven B. Steenbakkers, Piet, Studies on text, form and related topics , Assen: Van Gorcum. Steinberg, Justin, Viljanen, Valtteri, Verbeek, Theo, Wolfson, Harry, The Philosophy of Spinoza , 2 vols.

Bennett, Jonathan A Study of Spinoza's Ethics. Hackett Publishing Company. Buruma, Ian Spinoza: Freedom's Messiah. Yale University Press. Carlisle, Clare Spinoza's Religion. Princeton University Press. Curley, Edwin, ed. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1. Penguin classics 1st ed. London: Penguin Books. Della Rocca, Michael New York: Routledge.

Koistinen, Olli In Della Rocca, Michael ed. The Oxford Handbook of Spinoza. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Gullan-Whur, Margaret Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza. Jonathan Cape. Israel, Jonathan Spinoza, Life and Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, In van Bunge, Wiep ; Klever, Win eds.

Leiden: Brill Publishers. Jaspers, Karl 23 October Great Philosophers. Harvest Books. Kreines, James Garber, Daniel In Melamed, Yitzhak Y. Goldstein, Rebecca New York: Schocken Books. Totaro, Pina Shirley, Samuel Morgan, Michael L. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Nadler, Steven M. Spinoza: A Life. Cambridge University Press.

Spinoza: A Life 2nd ed. Spinoza's Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Nadler, Steven Newlands, Samuel Popkin, Richard H. In Popkin, Richard H. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Oneworld Publications. Scruton, Roger Spinoza: A Very Short Introduction.

Smith, Steven B. New Haven: Yale University Press. Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity. Touber, Jetze Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, — Stewart, Matthew New York: W. Norton and Company. Yovel, Yirmiyahu a. Yovel, Yirmiyahu b. Spinoza and other heretics: The Adventures of Immanence. Lin, Martin September Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Nadler, Steven b. JSTOR Simkins, James Spring Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies. The Westminster Review. Further reading [ edit ]. Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza. Oxford University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza. Cambridge Uni. Deleuze, Gilles , Spinoza: Philosophie pratique. Negotiations trans.

Gatens, Moira, and Lloyd, Genevieve, Collective imaginings: Spinoza, past and present. The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics. Goode, Francis, Life of Spinoza. Smashwords edition. Preface, in French, by Gilles Deleuze, available here: " Archived from the original on 11 June Edited by Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda, pp.

Leiden: Brill. Ives, David New York: Dramatists Play Service. Kayser, Rudolf, , with an introduction by Albert Einstein. Spinoza: Portrait of a Spiritual Hero. New York: The Philosophical Library. Kisner, Matthew J. Spinoza on human freedom: Reason, autonomy and the good life. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Reclaiming wonder. After the sublime. Edinburgh University Press. Spinoza and Human Freedom. Lovejoy, Arthur O. Reprinted in Frankfurt, H. Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor Books. Macherey, Pierre , Paris: PUF. Magnusson Magnusson, M ed. Matheron, Alexandre, Millner, Simon L. London: Verso, Negri, Antonio , Subversive Spinoza: Un Contemporary Variations.

Prokhovnik, Raia Spinoza and republicanism. Ratner, Joseph, Strauss, Leo. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, But the punishment prescribed for his heresy made it impossible for Benedict to continue running his father's firm which was, in any case, in financial trouble as a result of the first Anglo-Dutch war.

There is little definite information about Spinoza's life during the years immediately after his excommunication. Probably he remained in Amsterdam for most of this period, and began working as a lens grinder, a craft in which he earned a reputation for excellence. Perhaps he lodged at first with Francis van den Enden, a former Jesuit at whose school he had been learning Latin.

Van den Enden may also have helped to shape his inclinations toward the new philosophy, religious heterodoxy, and democratic politics. Perhaps Spinoza earned room and board by assisting Van den Enden in teaching Latin. Very probably he played parts in the comedies of Terence, which Van den Enden had his students perform in and Possibly he assisted the Quakers in their attempts to convert the Jews by translating some of their literature into Hebrew.

Sometime between and it appears that Spinoza did some formal study of philosophy at the University of Leiden. The Dutch Republic was the first place where Cartesianism took hold, having been introduced in by Regius, a professor of medicine at the University of Utrecht. Cartesianism was highly controversial. Voetius, a professor of theology at Utrecht, challenged Regius's doctrine that the union of soul and body is one of two separate substances, defending the scholastic-Aristotelian doctrine that the soul is the substantial form of the body.

In the university forbade the teaching of Cartesianism. Later in the s there were similar controversies at the University of Leiden. In Heereboord, a professor of logic at that university, defended the Cartesian method of doubt as a way of achieving certainty. Revius, a professor of theology at Leiden, replied that the method of doubt would lead to atheism and accused Descartes of Pelagianism.

In their controversy led the university to ban the discussion of Descartes' philosophy, pro or con. Nevertheless, in the late s Leiden was a place where one could study Cartesian philosophy. By the end of the s, Spinoza had established a circle of friends, the most notable of whom were Jan Rieuwertsz, a bookseller and publisher of Dutch translations of Descartes' works, who was later to become Spinoza's publisher; Jan Glazemaker, translator into Dutch of Descartes'works, who was later to translate most of Spinoza's works into Dutch; Peter Balling, the Amsterdam agent of various Spanish merchants, who was to translate Spinoza's first published work, an exposition of Descartes, into Dutch; the brothers Jan and Adriaan Koerbagh, the latter of whom died in prison for publishing Spinozistic views; and Lodewijk Meyer, a prominent member of Amsterdam literary circles, who wrote, in , a work entitled Philosophy, Interpreter of Holy Scripture.

Meyer's work anticipates some of the themes of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise TPT , though it differs from Spinoza in the solution it proposes. Meyer complains that theologians try to settle their controversies by appeals to scripture but that their interpretations of scripture are so insecurely based that the controversies never end.

Meyer thinks Descartes' work holds the key to ending these debates. He proposes to doubt everything alleged to be the teaching of scripture if it is not based on a solid foundation. Accepting the Cartesian doctrine that God is not a deceiver, and assuming that the books of the Old and New Testaments are the word of God, Meyer concludes that if a proposed interpretation of scripture conflicts with what philosophy shows to be the truth, we can reject that interpretation as false.

This is a modernized version of the Maimonidean approach to scripture that Spinoza rejected in the TPT. Spinoza's friends in Amsterdam shared an interest in Cartesian philosophy and in a religion which involves minimal theological doctrine, emphasizing the love of God and neighbor. Many were affiliated with the Collegiants, a liberal protestant group which had broken away from the Reformed Church after the Synod of Dort in , and which had neither a clergy nor a creed.

Many of Spinoza's friends also had a connection with the University of Leiden. Evidently Spinoza began writing his earliest philosophical works during this period: almost certainly the never-finished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect ; probably his Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being , a systematic presentation of his philosophy, foreshadowing his Ethics , but never put into final form; and an early version of the Theological-Political Treatise , which may have developed out of a defense of his religious opinions he wrote in Spanish, addressed to the synagogue.

The Treatise on the Intellect was first published in his Opera posthuma ; the Short Treatise was not discovered until the nineteenth century, in two manuscripts which apparently stem from a Dutch translation of a lost Latin original. The defense to the synagogue has never been found, though it seems possible to infer some of its likely content from the version of the Theological-Political Treatise published in The order of composition of Spinoza's earliest works has been debated, but there now seems to be a consensus that the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect TEI is the earliest of his surviving works.

It is a good place to start the exposition of Spinoza's philosophy, since it explains his motivation for becoming a philosopher. Spinoza begins the TEI by writing that experience had taught him that all the things men commonly pursue — wealth, honor and sensual pleasure — are empty and futile. The pursuit of these supposed goods does not lead to true peace of mind.

Sensual pleasure is transitory and, when past, is followed by great sadness. The desires for honor and wealth are never satisfied; when we achieve some measure of them, our success leads only to a never-ending quest for more of the same. When we are unsuccessful, we experience great sadness. The pursuit of honor has the special disadvantage that it puts us at the mercy of others' opinion.

The pursuit of wealth is subject to the uncertainties of fortune, as Spinoza might have learned from his experience as a merchant during the first Anglo-Dutch war. So Spinoza says he finally resolved to seek a good which would give him a joy unalloyed with sadness and which he thought could be found in love for something eternal and infinite.

Achieving that highest good, he concluded, would involve perfecting his own nature by acquiring knowledge of the union the mind has with the whole of nature. This decision evidently came only after the excommunication, though it probably culminated a period of reflection which began several years earlier. Spinoza's primary purpose in this work is to develop a theory of knowledge which will enable him — "with others if possible" — to attain the knowledge which is the highest good.

He conceives that project as requiring a healing and purification of the intellect. To this end he offers a classification of the different ways we can 'perceive' things so that he can choose the best. He enumerates four ways by which he has been lead to affirm something without doubt: 1 because someone has told him so; 2 because he has come to believe it by random experience; 3 because he has inferred the essence of a thing from something else but not adequately ; and 4 because he has come to perceive the thing through its essence alone or through knowledge of its proximate cause.

Of the numerous examples Spinoza gives of things he has come to believe in these ways, one must suffice here. Suppose we are given three numbers, a, b , and c , and wish to find a fourth number, d , which is to c as b is to a. And finally, 4 , some will simply see, intuitively, the answer to the problem, without going through any inferential process.

Surprisingly, given his fondness for demonstration in the Ethics , Spinoza rejects all of the first three paths to knowledge, and he claims that only the fourth way of affirming things will lead us to the perfection we seek. But, he says ruefully, the things he has so far been able to understand by this kind of knowledge are very few.

The middle portion of the TEI is a search for a method of acquiring knowledge in this fourth way. The reasoning here is obscure and seems to present difficulties which may explain why Spinoza never finished this work. For example, he claims that truth needs no sign and that having a true idea is sufficient to remove all doubt. But the method is supposed to teach us what a true idea is and how to distinguish it from other perceptions.

That quest seems to assume that we do need a sign to recognize a true idea. The concluding sections of the work, however, contain suggestive hints about Spinoza's metaphysical views during this period. A proper application of the method, it seems, will require us to order our ideas in a way which reflects the order of things in nature, reflects, that is, the causal structure of nature.

This in turn requires that we begin by understanding what he calls "the source and origin of Nature," which he identifies with "the first elements of the whole of nature. The first elements of the whole of nature would evidently be uncreated things which exist in themselves, independently of anything else. Spinoza explains that if something exists in itself, it is its own cause.

Everything else in nature presumably would depend in some way on the first elements. But how do 'created' things depend on 'uncreated' things? And how can something be its own cause? Toward the end of the TEI Spinoza makes another distinction, which may help to answer these questions. He distinguishes between what he calls the series of fixed and eternal things and the series of singular, changeable things.

The singular changeable things are apparently the particular, finite things we encounter in our daily experience. The fixed and eternal things are said to be present everywhere, to be the causes of all things, and to have laws "inscribed in them," according to which the singular, changeable things come to be and are ordered. There are, it appears, two causal orders, one of which relates singular, changeable things to other singular, changeable things, the other of which relates them to fixed and eternal things.

The true progress of the intellect requires understanding how singular, changeable things are related to the series of fixed and eternal things. To trace their connection with the series of other singular, changeable things would be impossible, because of the infinity of that series. But it would also not give us insight into the essences of the singular changeable things.

What does this mean? In particular, what are these fixed and eternal things? One plausible conjecture is this: central to Descartes' philosophy is the claim that philosophy is like a tree whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are all the other sciences. What underlies this metaphor is Descartes' idea — present both in his cosmological treatise, The World , and in his Principles of Philosophy — that the fundamental laws of physics — such as the principle of inertia and the principle of conservation of motion — can be deduced from the attributes of God in particular, from his immutability.

From these fundamental laws of physics, which apply to all bodies, we can deduce other, more specific laws which apply to particular kinds of bodies such as magnets and which are the subjects of the special sciences such as medicine and mechanics. In principle it should be possible to deduce all the laws governing the operations of physical objects from the fundamental laws of physics.

And everything which happens in the physical world except insofar as it involves the intervention of mental acts, which are outside the causal network is governed by scientific laws. Suppose Spinoza accepted the broad outlines of this Cartesian vision of a unified science. He would not have accepted the idea that minds can operate as uncaused causes, interfering with what would otherwise be the course of physical nature.

And he would not have accepted the idea that the will of a personal God is the ultimate cause of the fundamental laws of physics. But he does seem to have accepted the idea that there are fundamental laws of physics, from which all the other laws of physical nature can in principle be deduced, and that all the operations of physical objects can be understood in terms of these laws.

On this hypothesis, the first elements of the whole of nature, which are among the fixed and eternal things, would be those general features of extended nature which the fundamental laws of physics describe. The other fixed and eternal things, which are connected in a finite series running between the first elements and the singular changeable things, would be the general features of nature which the derivative laws of physics describe.

And the singular, changeable things would be the particular physical objects whose operations are explained by these laws. The order of ideal science reflects the causal structure of nature. This account may give the impression that Spinoza thought of science as a wholly a priori enterprise which proceeds by the intuition of first principles and deduction of theorems from those first principles.

But the final sections of the TEI make it clear that Spinoza recognized that achieving knowledge of singular, changeable things would require some appeal to experience. The laws of nature describe general, unchanging facts, which hold at all times and places. They are not sufficient by themselves to explain why events in the physical world happen at the particular times and places they do.

To understand that, Spinoza thinks, we must appeal to "other aids," to experiments which will enable us to determine by what laws of eternal things the particular event occurred. But before we can conduct fruitful experiments, we must first come to understand the nature of our senses so that we will know how to use them. Since that would appear to require knowledge of singular things, there seems to be a problem of circularity here, which may be one reason why Spinoza never succeeded in finishing this treatise.

One puzzle about the TEI, not resolved by the above interpretation, is what the relation is between the "first elements of the whole of nature" and Spinoza's later metaphysical categories. In the TEI Spinoza never uses the terms "substance," "attribute," and "mode," which are fundamental to the metaphysics of the Ethics. If the first elements are the uncreated things Spinoza mentions in the TEI's theory of definition, then we might be inclined to identify them with the one substance, God.

The uncreated things exist in themselves, or are their own cause, and the concept of existing in itself is one Spinoza later used to define substance. Moreover, the first elements are supposed to be "the source and origin of Nature. The problem is that there is, evidently, a plurality of first elements, and only one substance, only one God. The next work we consider may provide a solution to this puzzle.

It is clear that Spinoza intended the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect as a prelude to a systematic exposition of his philosophy; from the correspondence it seems almost certain that some version of The Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-being ST was the systematic exposition the TEI was intended to introduce. Spinoza probably began writing it while he was still living in Amsterdam, but he must have finished it after he moved to Rijnsburg in the summer of , when he apparently sent a copy of the Latin manuscript back to his friends in Amsterdam.

This manuscript would then have been translated into Dutch for the members of his circle who could not read Latin. It is that Dutch manuscript, or manuscripts descended from it, which provides the basis for our knowledge of the ST. Spinoza was still uncertain about publishing the ST as late as April , when he had already made a start on expounding his philosophy in the geometric style of his Ethics.

He had initially written the ST at the request of his friends, but only for private circulation, not publication. It appears that he sent them the manuscript some time after he moved to Rijnsburg. He hesitated to publish this work because he knew it was theologically unorthodox and he was reluctant to invite the attacks he knew would come from the conservative Calvinist clergy.

The surviving manuscripts present many textual difficulties. Frequently we do not know whether what we are reading is originally from Spinoza's hand, an addition by an early reader, a mistranslation of the Latin original, or a copyist's error. It appears that even in those portions of the manuscripts we can confidently ascribe to Spinoza, the views he holds, or the ways he expresses or argues for those views, reflect an early, formative stage of his thought.

There also seem to be different strata in the manuscripts themselves, reflecting different stages in his thought. Often the argument is quite obscure. In spite of these difficulties, the ST can be very instructive. Many of the central theses of the Ethics are already present in this work; it is interesting to see the form they take here.

Like Descartes, Spinoza holds that God exists necessarily. He accepts versions of the ontological and causal arguments Descartes had used to prove this in the Meditations. The work does not yet have the distinctively Spinozistic arguments used in the Ethics. He defines God as a being consisting of infinite attributes, each perfect in its kind.

This is not a definition Descartes had explicitly given, though it is one he might have accepted. From the correspondence we know Spinoza thought it followed from the definition Descartes did give, that God is by definition a supremely perfect being. Unlike Descartes, and anticipating the Ethics though often with different arguments , Spinoza contends that no substance can be finite; that there are no two substances of the same kind; that one substance cannot produce another; that God is an immanent cause; that both thought and extension are attributes of God; that man is not a substance, but a mode of substance; that the human soul or mind is a mode of thought, the idea of its body, which is, a mode of extension.

Spinoza also argues in this work for theses which appear in the Ethics without argument, such as the identification of God with Nature. Early in the ST he contends that, because no attributes can exist in the divine intellect which do not exist in Nature, Nature must be a being which consists of infinite attributes, each perfect in its kind.

So Nature satisfies the definition of God. The identification of God with Nature and the claim that God is an extended substance are only two of several claims Spinoza makes in this work which he might have expected to arouse theological opposition. Also provocative are his contentions that because God is supremely perfect, he could not omit doing what he does; and that the properties of God commonly included in lists of his attributes — omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, simplicity, and so on — are not, strictly speaking, divine attributes , which tell us what God is in himself, but only modes, which can be attributed to him in virtue of some or all of his attributes.

Omniscience, for example, presupposes thought; so it must be a mode, not an attribute; but it applies to God only in virtue of the attribute of thought, not in virtue of the attribute of extension. Eternity, on the other hand, would apply to God in virtue of all of his attributes. But it is not an attribute, because it does not tell us what God is.

It only tells us something about the manner of God's existence, that he exists timelessly and immutably. Spinoza also argues that, because God is omnipotent, he does not give laws to men which they are capable of breaking who could disobey the will of an omnipotent being? The God of the ST, like the God of the Ethics , is a philosopher's God, an eternal first cause of all things, quite remote from the God who revealed himself to the Jews through his prophets, chose them as his people, performed miracles on their behalf, rewarded them when they obeyed his laws, and punished them when they disobeyed.

Presumably something like this is what Spinoza meant when he said to the elders of the synagogue that God exists "only philosophically" and that the law of Moses is not a true law, that it does not, as Judaism supposes, represent a divine command which people may either obey or disobey at their peril. If there is no divine law which is binding on us, how, then, should we conduct ourselves?

Here Spinoza develops at considerable length a theme he only hinted at it in the TEI: that we must set aside worldly goods to seek a good which can give us joy unmixed with sadness, transferring our love for finite, transitory things to something eternal and infinite, perfecting our nature by acquiring knowledge of "the union the mind has with the whole of nature.

The first, opinion, combines the first two forms of perception enumerated in the TEI: beliefs we form on the basis of what others have told us and beliefs based on what the TEI called "random experience. We can make progress towards overcoming these irrational passions if we pass from opinion to what the ST sometimes calls 'belief' and sometimes calls 'true belief.

True belief, the second of three modes of cognition in the ST, is equivalent to the third of the four modes of cognition in the TEI and to what Spinoza calls 'reason' in the Ethics. So it would involve rational demonstration from certain premises. How does true belief enable us to overcome our irrational passions? Partly, it seems, by eliminating beliefs formed through unreliable ways of perceiving things, but partly also by enabling us to recognize that man is a part of nature where this implies that man must follow the laws of nature, that his actions are as necessary as those of any other thing in nature and partly by teaching us that good and evil are not something inherent in the things we judge to be good and evil, but that they are related to human nature.

The good is what helps us to attain what our intellect conceives to be perfection for a human being; evil is what hinders our attaining it or does not assist it. But as in the TEI, Spinoza does not think this form of cognition can take us all the way to our goal. That requires the highest form, which this work usually calls 'clear knowledge,' or 'science,' which we achieve when we are not merely convinced by reasons but are aware of and enjoy the thing itself.

If we achieve this kind of knowledge of God, we will come to love Him and be united with Him, as we now love and are united with the body. In our union with Him, we will be released from the body and achieve an eternal and immutable constancy. This affirmation that we can achieve immortality looks like a startling departure from one of the views for which Spinoza was condemned by the synagogue — that the soul dies with the body.

In other respects the ST seems to remain committed to the early heresies and to enable us to understand Spinoza's reasons for holding them. In this instance, it looks as though Spinoza has reverted to what his community regarded as orthodox belief. But as we will see when we come to the Ethics , it does not appear that the 'immortality' Spinoza allows is a personal immortality.

In the preceding section we noted a puzzle about Spinoza's early metaphysics: How are the "first elements of the whole of nature," which the TEI said were the "source and origin of nature," related to the categories of Spinoza's later metaphysics? If the first elements are "uncreated things," then Spinoza's theory of definition in the TEI implies that they exist in themselves, which would mean that they are substances.

But the first elements are evidently many; and there is supposed to be only one substance. In the ST the answer appears to be that the first elements of nature are the attributes, which Spinoza defines as existing through themselves and known through themselves, in contrast with the modes, which exist through and are understood through the attributes of which they are modes.

So the attributes taken individually satisfy the definition of substance that Spinoza will give in the Ethics. The reason there is nevertheless only one substance is that the many attributes are attributes of one being, God or Nature. Here for the first time Spinoza makes his distinction between natura naturans , defined as a being we conceive clearly and distinctly through itself all the attributes, or God , and natura naturata , the modes which depend on and are understood through God.

He divides natura naturata into universal and particular modes, identifying only one universal mode in each attribute: motion in extension and intellect in thought. These he describes as infinite, eternal, and immutable, proceeding immediately from God, and in turn the cause of the particular modes, which are 'corruptible': they are changeable, have a beginning, and will have an end.

The idea underlying the identification of motion as a "universal" mode of extension is that, in accordance with the mechanistic program of the new philosophy, the particular properties of individual extended objects are a function of the different degrees of motion of their component parts. By mid-summer of Spinoza had moved to Rijnsburg, a quiet village near Leiden, which had been the center of the Collegiant sect.

The extant correspondence begins during this period, so we are much better informed about these years in Spinoza's life.