Appendices and Omissions

of the Doctrine of the Ideal and the Real.

Two ink splotches obscure a few words in the middle-left of the original manuscript.

conceived. This essentially means that the distinction between the thinking and the extended, or spirit and body, is unfounded and therefore inadmissible; thus, it should not have been discussed any further. However, he still retains it insofar as he tirelessly repeats that both are one. To this he then attaches, by a mere "Thus also," the claim that "the mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing" original Latin: "modus extensionis et idea illius modi una eademque est res" (Ethics, Part II, Proposition 7, Scholium).; by which is meant that our representation German: Vorstellung. The mental image or perception we have of an object. of bodies and these bodies themselves are one and the same. However, this "Thus also" is an insufficient transition: for from the fact that the distinction between spirit and body, or between the subject representing and the thing extended, is unfounded, it by no means follows that the distinction between our representation and an objective and real entity existing outside of it—this primal problem raised by CartesiusRené Descartes (1596–1650), the "father of modern philosophy," who famously struggled to prove how the internal mind can know the external world.—is also unfounded. The thinking subject and the thought object may well be of the same kind; yet the question remains whether we can safely conclude from representations in my head to the existence of beings distinct from me, existing in themselves, i.e., independently of those representations. The difficulty is not the one into which LeibnizGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a German polymath and philosopher. (e.g., Theodicy, Part I, § 59) would particularly like to twist it—namely, that no interaction or community could take place between the assumed souls and the corporeal world as two completely heterogeneous kinds of substances, which is why he denied physical influence. For this difficulty? is merely a consequence of rational psychology, which needs? only to be set aside? as a fiction, as SpinozaBaruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a Dutch-Jewish philosopher who argued that mind and body are just different ways of looking at the same underlying reality. does. Moreover, against the assertion of it?, one can apply their own dogma as an "argument directed at the man" original Latin: "argumentum ad hominem"—a logical strategy of using an opponent's own beliefs against them.: that God, who is after all a spirit, created the corporeal world and continuously governs it, meaning a spirit can indeed act directly upon bodies. Rather, the difficulty remains purely the Cartesian one: that the world, which alone is immediately given to us, is absolutely only an ideal one—that is, consisting of mere representations in our heads—while we undertake to judge, beyond these, a real world existing independently of our representing. This problem, therefore, Spinoza [addressed] by the fact that...