ality alone is
revealed to him. Spinoza is quite conscious of this process, conscious
that he reaches the affirmation of substance by a negation of what he
conceives as the purely negative and unreal existence of finite
things, but as he regards the assertion of the finite as merely an
illusion due to _our_ imagination, so he regards the correction of
this illusion, the negation of the finite as a movement of reflection
which belongs merely to our intelligence, and has nothing to do with
the nature of substance in itself. We find the true affirmation by the
negation of the negative, but in itself affirmation has no relation to
negation. Hence his absolute being is the dead all-absorbing substance
and not the self-revealing spirit. It is the being without
determination, and not the being that determines itself. There is no
reason in the nature of substance why it should have either attributes
or modes; neither individual finite things nor the general distinction
of mind and matter can be deduced from it. The descending movement of
thought is not what Spinoza himself said it should be, an evolution,
but simply an external and empirical process by which the elements
dropped in the ascending movement of abstraction are taken up again
with a merely nominal change. For the sole difference in the
conception of mind and matter as well as in the conception of
individual minds and bodies which is made by their reference to the
idea of God, is that they lose their substantive character and become
adjectives. Aristotle objected to Plato that his ideas were merely
[Greek: aistheta aidia], that is, that his idealization of the world
was merely superficial, and left the things idealized very much what
they were before to the sensuous consciousness; and the same may be
said of Spinoza's negation of finite things. It was an external and
imperfect negation, which did not transform the idea of the finite,
but merely substituted the names of attributes and modes for the names
of general and individual substances.

The same defective logic, by which the movement of thought in
determining the substance is regarded as altogether external to the
substance itself, is seen again in Spinoza's conceptions of the
relations of the attributes to each other. Adopting the Cartesian
opposition of mind and matter, he does not see, any more than
Descartes, that in their opposition the