endency of our minds, which leads us to bring all beings
that have the external form of man under one and the same definition,
and to suppose that they are all equally capable of the highest
perfection we can deduce from such a definition. When, therefore, we
find an individual whose works are not consistent with this
perfection, straightway we judge that he is deprived of it, or that he
is diverging from his own nature,--a judgment we should never make if
we had not thus referred him to a general definition, and supposed him
to be possessed of the nature it defines. But since God does not know
things abstractly, or through such general definitions, and since
there cannot be more reality in things than the divine intelligence
and power bestows upon them, it manifestly follows that the defect
which belongs to finite things, cannot be called a privation in
relation to the intelligence of God, but only in relation to the
intelligence of man."[40] Thus evil and good vanish when we consider
things _sub specie aeternitatis_, because they are categories that
imply a certain independence in finite beings. For the idea of a moral
standard implies a relation of man to the absolute good, a relation of
the finite to the infinite, in which the finite is not simply lost and
absorbed in the infinite. But Spinoza can admit no such relation. In
the presence of the infinite the finite disappears, for it exists only
by abstraction and negation; or it _seems_ to us to exist, not because
of what is present to our thoughts, but because of what is not present
to them. As we think ourselves free because we are conscious of our
actions but not of their causes, so we think that we have an
individual existence only because the infinite intelligence is not
wholly but only partially realized in us. But as we cannot really
divide space, though we can think of a part of it, so neither can we
place any real division in the divine intelligence. In this way we can
understand how Spinoza is able to speak of the human mind as part of
the infinite thought of God, and of the human body as part of the
infinite extension of God, while yet he asserts that the divine
substance is simple, and not made up of parts. So far as they exist,
they must be conceived as parts of the divine substance, but when we
look directly at that divine substance their separate existence
altogether disappears.