THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
beautiful; if it is not, those objects are called ugly." 49 In such passages
Spinoza passes beyond Plato, who thought that his esthetic judgments
must be the laws of creation and the eternal decrees of God.
Is God a person? Not in any human sense of this word. Spinoza notices
"the popular belief which still pictures God as of the male, not of the
female sex"; 50 and he is gallant enough to reject a conception which
mirrored the earthly subordination of woman to man. To a correspondent
who objected to his impersonal conception of Deity, Spinoza writes in
terms reminiscent of the old Greek sceptic Xenophanes:
When you say that if I allow not in God the operations of seeing, hearing,
observing, willing, and the like . . . you know not what sort of God mine is,
I thence conjecture that you believe there is no greater perfection than such
as can be explained by the attributes aforesaid. I do not wonder at it; for
I believe that a triangle, if it could speak, would in like manner say that
God is eminently triangular, and a circle that the divine nature is eminently
circular; and thus would every one ascribe his own attributes to God. 51
Finally, "neither intellect nor will pertains to the nature of God," 52 in
the usual sense in which these human qualities are attributed to the Deity;
but rather the will of God is the sum of all causes and all laws, and the
intellect of God is the sum of all mind. "The mind of God," as Spinoza
conceives it, "is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time,
the diffused consciousness that animates the world." 53 "All things, in
however diverse degree, are animated. 5 ' 54 Life or mind is one phase or
aspect of everything that we know, as material extension or body is
another; these are the two phases or attributes (as Spinoza calls them)
through which we perceive the operation of substance or God; in this
sense God the universal process and eternal reality behind the flux of
things may be said to have both a mind and a body. Neither mind nor
matter is God; but the mental processes and the molecular processes
which constitute the double history of the world
and their laws, are God.
these, and their causes
2. MATTER AND MIND
But what is mind, and what is matter? Is the mind material, as some
unimaginative people suppose; or is the body merely an idea, as some
imaginative people suppose? Is the mental process the cause, or the
effect, of the cerebral process? or are they, as Malebranche taught, unrelated
and independent, and only providentially parallel?
Neither is mind material, answers Spinoza, nor is matter mental;
neither is the brain-process the cause, nor is it the effect, of thought; nor
"Ethics, I, App. "Epistle 58, cd. Willis. ^Epistle 60, ed. Willis.
f 17, note. ^Sautayana, loc. cit., p. x. '"'Ethics, II, 13, note.