imately so. Whether it be
possible to bridge over the gulf between existing things
and the abstract conception of them, as Spinoza attempts
to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal road to
certainty if it be a practicable one, but we cannot say
that we ever met any one who could say honestly
Spinoza had convinced him; and power of demonstration,
like all other powers, can be judged only
by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction?
If not, it is nothing. We need not detain
our readers among these abstractions. The real power
of Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary
appreciation, or we should long ago have heard the last
of it. Like all other systems which have attracted
followers, it addresses itself not to the logical intellect
but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside.
We refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which
it thrusts itself upon our reception, but regarding it
as a whole, as an attempt to explain the nature of the
world, of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves
how far the attempt is successful. Some account of
these things we know that there must be, and the
curiosity which asks the question regards itself, of
course, as competent in some degree to judge of the
answer to it. Before proceeding, however, to regard
this philosophy in the aspect in which it is really
powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy
of the method.

The system is evolved in a series of theorems in
severely demonstrative order out of the definitions and
axioms which we have translated. To propositions 1--6
we have nothing to object; they will not, probably,
convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely
abstract, and seem to follow (as far as we can speak
of "following," in such subjects), by fair reasoning.
"Substance is prior in nature to its affections."
"Substances with different attributes have nothing in
common," and therefore "one cannot be the cause of the
other." "Things really distinct are distinguished by
difference either of attribute or mode (there being
nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and
therefore, because things modally distinguished do not
qua substance differ from one another, there cannot be
more than one substance of the same attribute; and
therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among
what Spinoza calls notiones simplicissimas), since there
cannot be two substances of the same attribute and
substances of differ