The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

He had seen clearly that the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature was necessary for him to understand the true good. If only the philosopher had begun his science from the very knowledge of this mind, separating those things which he found in his mind to be subject to variation from the necessary and universal ideas which, to one investigating the true good—that is, to one about to follow absolute practical reason and its dictates, and about to embrace most willingly not that prudence accommodated to vain and fleeting circumstances, but sanctity as the Apostle says (1 John 2:17), which is not to be changed—shine as a fixed star. But the method of that age was different. It was an inveterate custom, as if transferred to Spinoza from Descartes, that a beginning must always be made from constructing metaphysics, and that the Esse Being of things must always be explained before all other things. The knowledge of our mind leads through necessary arguments to God. But those mortals who are able to ascend from the former to the latter do not descend with equal success from the infinite to the finite. They begin, namely, from that which, because it is more remote from our knowledge, human imagination seems to itself to attain more easily than reason. If an error is admitted in the metaphysical treatment of the Infinite, it is both detected with the greatest difficulty and subtly insinuates itself into all the remaining articles of the system. Hence, those who have become more cautious from the dangers of earlier philosophers have taught more correctly and happily that all moral doctrine should be independent of metaphysical dogmas, deduced instead from that which is absolute in the human mind.