The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

by the reality of its nature be identified. Whether this is so or not, however, is the very knot, the very reef, which cannot be removed or moved from the middle through a conceived formal unity and through that ideal identity of subject and object.

But it is nonetheless quite easy to hold the unity of the ideal object with the subject—which truly exists while you are thinking—to be a real unity, and one necessary even outside the form of thinking. Furthermore, it is easy for those who are especially occupied in thinking, namely those who are philosophizing, to apply that reduction of diverse things to unity (which is necessary in the act of thinking, or enthymései meditation/inward reasoning), and the elevation of special reasons and laws to one primary reason (which they call the supreme principle), even to things, insofar as they are compelled to conceive of them as existing—that is, insofar as something is attributed to them by thought itself, by which they are posited as being outside of thought. If anyone makes this application fully and purely, he will reduce the tò pân the all in existence to tò hèn the one. For he has become accustomed in thinking always to consider two distinct things as one by a certain intuition; and thus, while he thinks, he proceeds to infinity. Now, therefore (as even very similar things can be confused for some time even by the most sagacious), he transfers the formal method of thinking outside its own boundaries—that is, to the connection of existing things. He takes the law of thinking for the law of existing. Once this is obtained or granted, no other system could be conceived that is more true to the system of Spinoza, or more consistent with itself.