incts teach
us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it
requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and
the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections
which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the
perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any
moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he
tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a
triangle were to conceive of him as _eminenter triangularis_, or a
circle to give him the property of circularity.

Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which
at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as
before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except
substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the
modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance
self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite
all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore
there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is
either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him,
modified in this manner or in that. Beyond him there is nothing, and
nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is
absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except
himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence
(for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily
flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the
nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from
eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right
angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon
words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical
demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The
properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and
the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known
to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence;
and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth
or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of
God.

Each attribute is infinite _suo genere_; and it is time that we should
know distinctly the meaning whi