child, says: “No effects of imagination springing from physical causes can ever be omens of future events; inasmuch as their causes do not involve any future events. But the effects of the imagination, or images originating in the mental disposition, may be omens of some future event; inasmuch as the mind may have a confused presentiment of the future. It may, therefore, imagine a future event as forcibly and vividly as though it were present; for instance a father (to take an example resembling your own) loves his child so much that he and the beloved child are, as it were, one and the same. And since (like that which I demonstrated on another occasion) there must necessarily exist in thought the idea of the essence of the child's states and their results, and since the father, through his union with his child, is a part of the said child, the soul of the father must necessarily participate in the ideal essence of the child and his states and in their results.”[1]
Notice in this language that Spinoza holds that future events are discerned not by means of present external events affecting the mind but by the internal nature of the mind itself; and that such events, since they are mental states are discerned by one mind on account of its union with or relation to another mind with reference to which these events or states are to happen. All this follows from the theory that there is one universal mind, activities of which all particular minds or
- ↑ Letter, 30.
