noza's time than it is
to-day. For the whole trend of philosophy during the nineteenth century
was towards a view of Extension itself as a mode of Thought, and
therefore toward the absorption of one of Spinoza's theoretical divine
attributes in the other.

[Sidenote: Their Effect on his System.]

Now if this should prove to be the permanent tendency of the most
influential thinkers--as indeed seems most likely--it will probably be
held that Spinoza was wrong in attributing extension to the Eternal as
one of the qualities of His substance, except in so far as extension is,
if not a necessary, at any rate an actual, and so far as we know, a
universal mode of thought. But though, as Sir Frederick Pollock has
pointed out, Spinoza has in a manner "counted thought twice over" while
treating of the only two infinite attributes cognizable to us, we need
not, on that account, surrender his luminous idea of God as a Being
absolutely infinite, that is, "Substance consisting of infinite
Attributes, whereof each one expresses eternal and infinite being." Nor
need we abandon his supplementary but essential idea of "Modes" or
"modifications" which mould the attributes into the varieties of finite
worlds, known and unknown. Thus it may be that, in Spinoza's sense of
the word "Attribute," we shall have to confess that only one comes
within our human ken, that of Thought in a sense which includes feeling.
But if the late Herbert Spencer, apart from his synthetic philosophy of
phenomena, has left any permanent mark on the religions consciousness,
it has been by a consecration of the mystery of the ultimate
Unknowable.[17] And in the spirit of reverence thus taught by him we may
still hold with Spinoza that the Eternal has an infinity of other
attributes with their infinite modifications not within our cognizance.
This would only be an enlarged application of Hamlet's words:

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Or, to put it in another way, the Universe perceptible to us is only one
of an infinity of Universes. By which is not meant an infinite
extension of galaxies in space, but the co-existence and, so to speak,
interpenetration of an infinity of modes of existence imperceptible to
us.

[Sidenote: God Is Identical with the Whole of Being.]

To Spinoza, then, God is the totality of Being. But it is not to be
inferred that he identified God with the visible, or with any