PREFACE

...momentous truths original: "veritates" (completing the word "tr..." from the previous page) [may rest], even if one might wish [otherwise], and for that reason many are found who confuse it with fatal necessity fatalis necessitas The idea that everything happens by unavoidable fate, leaving no room for free will or divine choice. The author is defending his work against critics who claimed his philosophy led to such determinism., though it differs from it more than a human differs from a tree trunk. From this connection of things nexus rerum The rational and causal web that links all events and objects in the universe together. we shall derive truths quite unexpected in Natural Theology, and we shall find it equally fruitful in Ethics and Politics. In the most difficult matters, you are bound to be blind if you are ignorant of it, nor will a small part of philosophy be exiled from the demonstrative system if you do not admit it.

This will be most fully established when, once the entire system of Philosophy is completed, you wish to extract those propositions whose demonstrations either involve the connection of things, or involve principles depending on the connection of things. Posterity will no less wonder that introducing the connection of things into philosophy as a principle of demonstration was held as a crime, just as we now wonder at the malice joined with the thick ignorance of the Athenians, who held it as a crime to be punished by death and exile if anyone asserted that the moon was illuminated by the sun and eclipsed by the shadow of the earth (a) A reference to early Greek scientists like Anaxagoras, who were persecuted for providing natural explanations for celestial events that were previously seen as divine omens.. For truth is suppressed at the beginning, but it is never crushed. We have clearly taught how the movement of contingent things Things that happen but do not have to happen by logical necessity; events that could have been otherwise. in the world is determined, and how by a certain being different from the world, which will be demonstrated to be God in Natural Theology,

(a) See Plutarch, Book 2, On the Opinions of the Philosophers, chapter 24. original: "Vid. Plutarchus lib. 2. de placitis philosoph. c. 24"