was made that the counsels of the gods were beyond human understanding: which cause would have alone sufficed to hide the truth forever from mankind, had not the mathematics, which are concerned not with designed ends, but only with the nature and properties of figures, made manifest to them another pattern of truth."[1]
(3) The aim of notes to such a volume as this ought to be to put the student at the point of view of the author; the aim, or at least the effect, of Mr. Fullerton's notes is to suggest that the attempt to get at the author's point of view must end in failure. No doubt we are told (p. 200) that the "thoughtful student will find in the Ethics a mine of precious ore," but this "mine" the writer has himself carefully abstained from working. In his very first sentence he sounds a false note. " Just what Spinoza meant by substance is not clear" (p. 188). As "substance" is Spinoza, the conclusion would seem to be that the Ethics is a hopeless riddle. The rest of Note 1 seems intended to show that nobody knows what Spinoza understood by the term "substance," nor did he clearly know himself; but probably he held both the Neo-Platonic conception of it as "Being without distinctions," and the totally different view that it was simply " the sum of the attributes"; i.e. "the sum total of existing things." Now, no one who has looked at things through Spinoza's eyes would admit that either alternative expressed his thought. No doubt it may be maintained, and not altogether unfairly, that there are elements in the philosophy of Spinoza, which, if they were developed to their logical consequences, would lead to the conception of "Being without distinctions"; but I have no hesitation in saying that Spinoza never conceived of his Substantia or Deus otherwise than as a Being determined by an infinity of predicates. And certainly he was just as far from regarding God as "the sum total of existing things." Substance is for Spinoza that Reality which contains within itself an inexhaustible fulness that is eternally pouring itself forth in the infinite variety of Nature and of Mind, as well as in innumerable forms not directly known to us. No increase or diminution of its boundless activity is possible. In the incessant changes of the physical universe this self-evolving Reality is partially expressed; and as its energy has been outflowing from all eternity, and is unlimited in extent, we can predicate infinite Extension or Omnipresence of it. So we can attribute to it an infinite Thought, which is partially manifested in the ideas that are perpetually welling up in the minds of all finite creatures, and revealing to them dimly and imperfectly the changes going on in the world of nature. But though God is thus present in all the fluctuations of matter and of mind, we cannot say that he is merely the "sum total of existing
- ↑ Pollock's Spinoza, p. 350.
