The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

a notion of pure extension, he would have attained it nowhere. But, having forgotten the origin from which he drew it, he remained persuaded that he intuited those two attributes clearly in God or the Infinite. Furthermore, if he had set before himself this same contemplation of the mind or of the self as that deliberate study which is the primary thing, and from which one must begin, he would have undoubtedly been forced to discern τὸ Velle the will or the spontaneity of willing as a faculty entirely unique and as equally primitive in a being that is something to itself as τὸ Cogitare thinking. Had this been done, his entire Ethics—which now refers everything to thinking and thereby necessarily excludes moral freedom—could not have failed to be formed very differently regarding what pertains to humans. Indeed, in the theological principles he posited at the beginning, if he had felt compelled to consider τὸ perfecte to will perfectly (i.e., holily) no less than τὸ cogitare to think or to know 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 should be excluded from the clear idea of the most perfect being.

But a second point, which seems to touch the core of the Spinozistic system, must also be indicated. That is, that doctrine recommends itself marvelously through its simple unity, embracing everything through its ἓν καὶ πᾶν one and all. All things seem to be reduced to their one source, from which they do not even emanate, but in which they truly remain, such that this Pantheism can be called a system