The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

pure notion of extension anywhere. However, having forgotten the origin from which he drew it, he was persuaded that he perceived those two attributes clearly within God, or the Infinite. Furthermore, if he had set before himself that same contemplation of the mind, or of his own self, with deliberate study as that first principle from which he must work and progress, he would undoubtedly have been forced to distinguish Velle to will, or the spontaneity of willing, as a faculty entirely singular and as primitive in a being that is something to itself as Cogitare to think. Had this been done, his entire Ethica Ethics, now referring everything to thought and therefore necessarily excluding moral freedom, could not have been formed in any other way regarding human beings. But in the theological principles he posited, if he had felt compelled to consider perfecte perfectly (i.e., holily) willing no less than thinking or knowing as a primitive πνευματικὴν spiritual faculty, and thus to count it among the attributes of God of which we can have a clear idea, he would not have thought that the notion of infinite spontaneity or pure volition was excluded from the clear idea of the most perfect being.

But another factor, which seems to touch the head of the Spinozistic system, must also be indicated. Namely, that doctrine marvelously commends itself by its simple unity, embracing absolutely everything through its ἑν καὶ πᾶν one and all. Everything seems to be reduced to its one source, from which things do not even emanate, but in which they truly remain, so that this Pantheism is a system of immanent emanations.