ETHICS BY SPINOZA. EXCERPT...

ETHICS including IMPROVEMENT OF UNDERSTANDING, by Benedict de Spinoza (Prometheus Books, Amherst NY: 1677, 1989), PP.33-34 “As regards the order of our perceptions, and the manner in which they should be arranged and united, it is necessary that as soon as is possible and rational, we should inquire whether there be any being (and if so, what being) that is the cause of all things, so that its essence, represented in thought, may be the cause of all our ideas, and then our mind will to the utmost possible extent reflect nature. For it will possess, subjectively, nature's essence, order and union. Thus we can see that it is before all things necessary for us to deduce all our ideas from physical things—that is, from real entities, proceedings, as far as may be, according to the series of causes, from one real entity to another real entity, never passing to universals and abstractions, either for the purpose of deducing some real entity from them, or deducing them from some real entity. Either of these processes interrupts the true progress of understanding.... This inmost essence must be sought solely from fixed and eternal things, and from the laws inscribed (so to speak) in those things as in their true codes, according to which all particular things take place and are arranged; nay, these mutable particular things depend so intimately and essentially (so to phrase it) on the fixed things, that they cannot either be or be conceived without them.”