Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

272 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
wherewith each of them persists in existing follows from the eternal necessity of
the nature of God’.
This force or power 73 is something which is usually referred to as ‘conatus’
(literally, ‘endeavour’). Spinoza is here anticipating the important sixth
proposition of Part III of the Ethics, which states that ‘Each thing, in so far as it
is in itself (quantum in se est) endeavours to persist in its own being.’ The phrase
‘is in itself echoes Spinoza’s definition of substance in Definition 3 of Part I (cf.
p. 284), and serves to connect Proposition 6 of Part III with the Scholium to
Proposition 45 of Part II, which was discussed in the last paragraph. For since
there is only one substance, Proposition 6 of Part III must be taken to mean that
each thing endeavours to persist in its own being in so far as it is God—or (to use
the language of the Scholium to Proposition 45 of Part II) in so far as it ‘follows
from the eternal necessity of the nature of God’. This concept of conatus is
central to Spinoza’s moral philosophy, and a detailed discussion of it belongs to
the next chapter. But it is worth noting here that, for Spinoza, each particular
thing— and not just the very complex things that we call living beings—
endeavours, in so far as it is ‘in itself, to persist in its own being. So when
Spinoza says, in the Corollary to Lemma 3 of Part II of the Ethics, that ‘a moving
body continues in motion until determined to rest by another body’, this may be
regarded as an example of conatus —namely, the kind that is displayed by a
‘most simple body’.
What is most striking about Spinoza’s views concerning the causality of God
is the extreme form of determinism that they display. We have already seen
several respects in which Spinoza’s God differs from the God of the theist: how
God, although an efficient cause, does not create the universe from nothing, and
how God cannot act for an end. But there is another major difference. The God
of the theist creates freely: that is, God chooses to create, and could have chosen
differently. God’s freedom of choice was something on which Descartes laid
great stress; Spinoza, on the other hand, says 74 that God does not act out of free
will, but that things could not have been produced by God in any other way or
order from that in which they were produced. This means that there is no
objective justification for calling things contingent. Just what Spinoza is claiming
here can be seen from the way in which he argues for his conclusion. We know
that, if B is caused by A, then B follows necessarily from A. Now, everything is,
in the last analysis, caused by God, that is, follows necessarily from him; but
God (by Proposition 11 of Part I of the Ethics) exists necessarily. Therefore
everything that exists cannot but exist, and in the way that it does; or to put this
in another way, strictly speaking no other world order is conceivable. More than
this, Spinoza argues that whatever we conceive to be in God’s power (i.e.
whatever is logically possible) necessarily exists (Ethics, Pt I, Proposition 35).
From this it follows that, if something does not exist, then it is impossible that it
should have existed. In calling this an extreme form of determinism, I meant that
Spinoza is not content to say that given a certain set of laws, and given an initial
state of the universe, then absolutely all states of the universe can in principle be