Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

264 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
is clear that it rests on the concept of God as an infinite substance. 47 The thrust of
the argument is that God’s infinity as it were crowds out all other possible
substances, God remaining as the one and only substance. Descartes, too,
understood by ‘substance’ that which depends on no other thing for its existence,
and said that there is a sense in which the only substance is God (Principles of
Philosophy, Pt I, 51; CSM i, 210). However, he said that there is another sense of
‘substance’, in which we may call by the name of ‘substance’ that which
depends for its existence only on God; in this sense, we may speak of corporeal
substance and of created thinking substance. 48 Spinoza will not allow this second
sense of the word ‘substance’; indeed he would argue (as will be seen shortly)
that, by using it, Descartes had rendered insoluble the problem of the relations
between mind and matter. In place of corporeal and thinking substances, Spinoza
refers to ‘extension’ and ‘thought’, and says that these are not substances but are
attributes of the one substance.
Spinoza defines an attribute in the fourth definition of Part I of the Ethics as
‘that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence’; he
also speaks of the attributes as ‘expressing’ the essence of substance. 49 In
mentioning the intellect in his formal definition of an attribute, Spinoza has seemed
to some scholars to make the relation between substance and attribute a
subjective one; the intel-lect has been thought to impose attributes on a substance
which is in reality without them. This, however, is surely wrong. From the mass
of evidence that has been brought against the subjectivist interpretation, 50 it will
be sufficient to cite a remark contained in the proof of Proposition 44 of Part II.
Here, Spinoza says that ‘It is of the nature of reason to perceive things truly…
namely,…as they are in themselves.’ If, as is reasonable, one equates the
‘reason’ that is mentioned here with the ‘intellect’ mentioned in the definition of
an attribute, then Spinoza is saying that, if the intellect perceives X as
constituting the essence of substance, then X does indeed constitute the essence
of substance.
In the first part of the Ethics, Spinoza’s discussion of the attributes is carried
on in quite general terms; nothing is said expressly that enables the reader to say
that this or that is an example of an attribute. 51 Only in the first two propositions
of Part II are we told that, of the infinite attributes that God has, two are
extension and thought. 52 Two points must be noted here. First, it must be realized
that the attributes of extension are not abstractions, even though Spinoza uses
abstract nouns to refer to them. Spinoza makes it clear that to speak, for
example, of the attribute of extension is to speak of God as extended, God as an
‘extended thing’ (Ethics, Proposition 2 of Part II). Second, each attribute (by
Definition 6 of Part I) is infinite; so to talk about extension is to talk about an
extended reality that is infinite.
In saying that extension and thought express the essence of substance, Spinoza
obviously means that each is of fundamental importance to our understanding of
reality. What is perhaps not so obvious is that his views about attributes are not
entirely at variance with those of Descartes. When Descartes spoke of corporeal