The Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

He had perceived that the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature was necessary for him to understand the true good. I wish the philosopher had begun his science from the actual attainment of this knowledge of the mind, by separating those things which he discovered to be subject to variations in his own mind from the necessary and universal ideas, which stand out like an immovable star to a man investigating the true good—that is, to one who is about to follow practical reason and its absolute dictates, and who is about to embrace most willingly not that prudence accommodated to vain and fleeting circumstances, but holiness that is not to be changed forever, as the Apostle says (1 John 2:17). But the method of that age was different. It was an inveterate custom, transferred as it were from Descartes to Spinoza, that the beginning must always be made by constructing metaphysics, and that to on Being of things must always be explained before all else. The knowledge of our mind leads to God by necessary arguments. But those who are able to ascend from the former to the latter do not descend from the infinite to the finite with equal success. For they make a beginning from that which, because it is more remote from our cognition, human imagination seems to itself to grasp more easily than reason. Once this is done, if an error is admitted in the metaphysical treatment of the Infinite, it is both very difficult to detect and yet insinuates itself subtly into all the remaining articles of the system. Hence, having been made more cautious by the dangers of earlier philosophers, we strive so that all moral doctrine may be independent of metaphysical dogmas, starting from that which...