, and after the
manner of Euclid, places at the head of each book of his _Ethics_ a
certain number of definitions, axioms, and postulates which are
supposed to be intuitively certain, and to form a sufficient basis for
all that follows. Altogether there are twenty-seven definitions,
twenty axioms, and eight postulates. If Spinoza is regarded as the
most consequent of philosophers it cannot be because he has based his
system upon so many fragmentary views of truth; it must be because a
deeper unity has been discerned in the system than is visible on the
first aspect of it. We must, therefore, to a certain extent
distinguish between the form and the matter of his thought, though it
is also true that the defective form itself involves a defect in the
matter.

What in the first instance recommends the geometrical method to
Spinoza is, not only its apparent exactness and the necessity of its
sequence, but, so to speak, its disinterestedness. Confusion of
thought arises from the fact that we put ourselves, our desires and
feelings and interests, into our view of things; that we do not regard
them as they are in themselves, in their essential nature, but look
for some final cause, that is, some relation to ourselves by which
they may be explained. For this reason, he says, "the truth might for
ever have remained hid from the human race, if mathematics, which
looks not to the final cause of figures, but to their essential nature
and the properties involved in it, had not set another type of
knowledge before them." To understand things is to see how all that is
true of them flows from the clear and distinct idea expressed in their
definition, and ultimately, it is to see how all truth flows from the
_essentia Dei_ as all geometrical truth flows from the idea of
quantity. To take a mathematical view of the universe, therefore, is
to raise ourselves above all consideration of the end or tendency of
things, above the fears and hopes of mortality into the region of
truth and necessity. "When I turned my mind to this subject," he says
in the beginning of his treatise on politics, "I did not propose to
myself any novel or strange aim, but simply to demonstrate by certain
and indubitable reason those things which agree best with practice.
And in order that I might inquire into the matters of this science
with the same freedom of mind with which we are wont to treat