events
within a year, is a problem that falls quite outside Spinoza's
fundamental arguments.

[Sidenote: Spinoza's Provision for the Finite.]

Sect. 153. But the advance of Spinoza over the Eleatics must not be lost
sight of. The modern philosopher has so conceived being as to provide
for parts within an individual unity. The geometrical analogy is a most
illuminating one, for it enables us to understand how manyness may be
indispensable to a being that is essentially unitary. The triangle as
triangle is one. But it could not be such without sides and angles. The
unity is equally necessary to the parts, for sides and angles of a
triangle could not be such without an arrangement governed by the nature
triangle. The whole of nature may be similarly conceived: as the
reciprocal necessity of _natura naturans_, or nature defined in respect
of its unity, and _natura naturata_, or nature specified in detail.
There is some promise here of a reconciliation of the _Way of Opinion_
with the _Way of Truth_. Opinion would be a gathering of detail, truth a
comprehension of the intelligible unity. Both would be provided for
through the consideration that whatever is complete and necessary must
be made up of incompletenesses that are necessary to it.

[Sidenote: Transition to Teleological Conceptions.]

Sect. 154. This consideration, however, does not receive its most
effective formulation in Spinoza. The isolation of the parts, the
actual severalty and irrelevance of the modes, still presents a grave
problem. Is there a kind of whole to which not only parts but fragments,
or parts in their very incompleteness, are indispensable? This would
seem to be true of a _progression_ or _development_, since that would
require both perfection as its end, and degrees of imperfection as its
stages. Spinoza was prevented from making much of this idea by his
rejection of the principle of _teleology_. He regarded appreciation or
valuation as a projection of personal bias. "Nature has no particular
goal in view," and "final causes are mere human figments." "The
perfection of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature and
power."[318:7] The philosophical method which Spinoza here repudiates,
the interpretation of the world in moral terms, is _Platonism_, an
independent and profoundly important movement, belonging to the same
general realistic type with Eleaticism and Spinozism. Absolute being is
again the fundamental conception. Here, howe