THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
But further Spinoza identifies substance with nature and God. After the
manner of the Scholastics, he conceives nature under a double aspect: as
active and vital process, which Spinoza calls natura naturans nature
begetting, the elan vital and creative evolution of Bergson; and as the
passive product of this process, natura naturata nature begotten, the
material and contents of nature, its woods and winds and waters, its
hills and fields and myriad external forms. It is in the latter sense that he
denies, and in the former sense that he affirms, the identity of nature and
substance and God. Substance and modes, the eternal order and the
temporal order, active nature and passive nature, God and the world,
all these are for Spinoza coincident and synonymous dichotomies; each
divides the universe into essence and incident. That substance is insubstantial,
that it is form and not matter, that it has nothing to do with that
mongrel and neuter composite of matter and thought which some interpreters
have supposed it to be, stands out clearly enough from this identi-
fication of substance with creative but not with passive or material nature.
A passage from Spinoza's correspondence may help us :
I take a totally different view of God and Nature from that which the
later Christians usually entertain, for I hold that God is the immanent, and
not the extraneous, cause of all things. I say, All is in God; all lives and
moves in God. And this I maintain with the Apostle Paul, and perhaps with
every one of the philosophers of antiquity, although in a way other than
theirs. I might even venture to say that my view is the same as that entertained
by the Hebrews of old, if so much may be inferred from certain traditions,
greatly altered or falsified though they be. It is however a complete
mistake on the part of those who say that my purpose ... is to show that
God and Nature, under which last term they understand a certain mass of
corporeal matter, are one and the same. I had no such intention. 37
Again, in the Treatise on Religion and the State > he writes: "By the
help of God I mean the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or the
chain of natural events"; 38 the universal laws of nature and the eternal
decrees of God are one and the same thing. "Prom the infinite nature of
God all things . . . follow by the same necessity, and in the same way,
as it follows from the nature of a triangle, from eternity to eternity, that
its three angles are equal to two right angles." 39 What the laws of the
circle are to all circles, God is to the world. Like substance, God is the
causal chain or process, 40 the underlying condition of all things, 41 the law
and structure of the world. 42 This concrete universe of modes and things
is to God as a bridge is to its design, its structure, and the laws of mathe-
matics and mechanics according to which it is built; these are the sustain-
"Epistle 21. ^Ch. 3. **Ethics, I, 17, note.
*H6ffding5 History of Modern Philosophy, vol. i.
^Martineau, Study of Spinoza; London, 1822, p. 171.
"Prof. Woodbridge.