oved only by
impulse from without. "What were a God that only impelled the world
from without?" says Goethe. "It becomes him to stir it by an inward
energy, to involve nature in himself, himself in nature, so that that
which lives and moves and has a being in him can never feel the want
of his power or his spirit."

Logical diffculties in Spinoza's metaphysics.

While, however, Spinoza thus escapes some of the inconsequences of
Descartes, the contradiction that was _implicit_ in the Cartesian
system between the duality and the unity, the attributes and the
substance, in his system becomes _explicit_. When so great emphasis is
laid upon the unity of substance, it becomes more difficult to explain
the difference of the attributes. The result is, that Spinoza is
forced to account for it, not by the nature of substance itself, but
by the nature of the intelligence to which it is revealed. "By
substance," he says, "I understand that which is in itself, and is
conceived through itself. By attribute I understand the same thing,
nisi quod attributum dicatur respectu inteltectus substantiae certum
talem naturam tribuentis."[43] Hence we are naturally led with J.E.
Erdmann to think of the intelligence dividing the substance as a kind
of prism that breaks the white light into different colours, through
each of which the same world is seen, only with a different aspect.
But if the intelligence in itself is but a mode of one of the
attributes, how can it be itself the source of their distinction?

The key to this difficulty is that Spinoza has really, and almost in
spite of his logical principles, two opposite conceptions of
substance, between which he alternates without ever bringing them to a
unity. On the one hand, in accordance with the principle that
determination is negation, substance must be taken as that which is
utterly indeterminate, like the Absolute of the Buddhist, which we can
characterize only by denying of it everything that we assert of the
finite. In this view, no predicate can be applied univocally to God
and to the creatures; he differs from them, not only in existence, but
in essence.[44] If we follow out this view to its legitimate result,
God is withdrawn into his own absolute unity, and no difference of
attributes can be ascribed to him, except in respect of something else
than himself. It is owing to the defects of out intelligenc