The Remaining Works of Benedict de Spinoza

But truly, all this unity of the subject with the object is not necessarily such, except at the time when the subject is thinking. Furthermore, every deduction of grounded things or special reasons from one absolute and inherently true principle or reason does not occur except in the realm, so to speak, of reason or formal truth. Finally, that necessary identification of diverse things, without which there would be neither affirmation nor negation, also pertains to the form of thinking. Whether, however, two objects—which exist in the mind and are held by the given thinker at this moment in some respect as one, that is, conceived under the form of unity—are one by their very own nature, which we are compelled to attribute to those things that we cannot help but think of with the notion of existence, or whether they merely seem to be one to the thinker at this moment, that certainly the thinker, however much he may be a subject-object himself (i.e., thinking from his own subjective unity with the object), cannot formally judge, effect, and decide. This, of course, all either proclaim or feel depends on the matter; but the matter (I imply the internal matter of thinking) does not depend on that mode by which it is now thought by this one or that one, that is, reduced from diversity to unity. Rather, the ideal object—that is, that which resides in the mind and because of which the mind can rightly be called a subject-object—whenever it is presented to the mind to be thought of along with existence, is subject to necessity or the reality of its own nature, in such a way that the ideal object is identified with another formally in vain and erroneously, unless it must necessarily be identified by the reality of its own nature.