l, or rather that which is more appropriately termed
certainty and infallibility. Thus it results that very often the
difficulties only lie in the terms. I say as much with regard to the
Jansenists, although I do not wish to make excuse for those people in
everything.

372. With the Hebrew Cabalists, _Malcuth_ or the Kingdom, the last of the
Sephiroth, signified that God controls everything irresistibly, but gently
and without violence, so that man thinks he is following his own will while
he carries out God's. They said that Adam's sin had been _truncatio Malcuth
a caeteris plantis_, that is to say, that Adam had cut back the last of the
Sephiroth, by making a dominion for himself within God's dominion, and by
assuming for himself a freedom independent of God, but that his fall had
taught him that he could not subsist of himself, and that men must needs be
redeemed by the Messiah. This doctrine may receive a good interpretation.
But Spinoza, who was versed in the Cabala of the writers of his race, and
who says (_Tractatus Politicus_, c. 2, n. 6) that men, conceiving of
freedom as they do, establish a dominion within God's dominion, has [349]
gone too far. The dominion of God is with Spinoza nothing but the dominion
of necessity, and of a blind necessity (as with Strato), whereby everything
emanates from the divine nature, while no choice is left to God, and man's
choice does not exempt him from necessity. He adds that men, in order to
establish what is termed _Imperium in Imperio_, supposed that their soul
was a direct creation of God, something which could not be produced by
natural causes, furthermore that it had an absolute power of determination,
a state of things contrary to experience. Spinoza is right in opposing an
absolute power of determination, that is, one without any grounds; it does
not belong even to God. But he is wrong in thinking that a soul, that a
simple substance, can be produced naturally. It seems, indeed, that the
soul to him was only a transient modification; and when he pretends to make
it lasting, and even perpetual, he substitutes for it the idea of the body,
which is purely a notion and not a real and actual thing.

373. The story M. Bayle relates of Johan Bredenburg, a citizen of Rotterdam
(_Dictionary_, art. 'Spinoza', lit. H, p. 2774) is curious. He published a
book against Spinoza, entitled: _Enervatio Tractatus Theologico-politici,
una cum demonstratione geometrico ordine disposita, N