lishes this transition, while excluding altogether the idea of a
real division of the higher and the lower life, the spirit and flesh,
and of a conflict in which the former is developed through the
sacrifice of the latter.

Finite creatures exist only as modes of the divine substance, only so
far as they partake in the infinite, or what is the same thing with
Spinoza, in the purely affirmative or self-affirming nature of God.
They therefore must also be self-affirming. They can never limit
themselves; their limit lies in this, that they are not identified
with the infinite substance which expresses itself also in other
modes. In other words, the limit of any finite creature, that which
makes it finite, lies without it, and its own existence, so far as it
goes, must be pure self-assertion and self-seeking. "Unaquaeque res
quantum in se est in suo esse perseverare conatur," and this _conatus_
is its very essence or inmost nature.[49] In the animals this
_conatus_ takes the form of appetite, in man of desire, which is
"appetite with the consciousness of it."[50] But this constitutes no
essential difference between appetite and desire, for "whether a man
be conscious of his appetite or no, the appetite remains one and the
same thing."[51] Man therefore, like the animals, is purely
self-asserting and self-seeking. He can neither know nor will anything
but his own being, or if he knows or wills anything else, it must be
something involved in his own being. If he knows other beings, or
seeks their good, it must be because their existence and their good
are involved in his own. If he loves and knows God it must be because
he cannot know himself without knowing God, or find his supreme good
anywhere but in God.

What at first makes the language difficult to us is the identification
of will and intelligence. Both are represented as affirming their
objects. Descartes had prepared the way for this when he treated the
will as the faculty of judging or giving assent to certain
combinations of ideas, and distinguished it from the purely
intellectual faculties by which the ideas are apprehended. By this
distinction he had, as he supposed, secured a place for human freedom.
Admitting that intelligence is under a law of necessity, he claimed
for the Will a certain latitude or liberty of indifference, a power of
giving or withholding assent in all cases where the rel