Appendices and Omissions

Sketch of a History

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...he removes the distinction between thinking substance original Latin: substantia cogitans and extended substance original Latin: substantia extensa, he has not yet solved the problem, but at most has made physical influence The theory that the body can directly affect the soul and vice versa. permissible once again. This, however, is not sufficient to solve the difficulty: for the law of causality has been proven to be of subjective origin; but even if, conversely, it originated from external experience, it would then belong precisely to that world in question which is given to us merely as an idea German: ideell. Meaning existing as a mental representation rather than a physical object.; so that in no case can it provide a bridge between the absolutely objective and the subjective, but is rather merely the bond which links appearances German: Erscheinungen. The way things appear to our senses, as opposed to how they are in themselves. to one another. (See The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, p. 12.)

However, in order to explain more closely the aforementioned identity of extension and the representation of it, Spinoza posits something which encompasses the view of Malebranche and that of Leibniz at the same time. Specifically, in complete accordance with Malebranche, we see all things in God: "the ideas of particular things do not acknowledge as their cause the objects of the ideas themselves, or the things perceived, but God himself, insofar as he is a thinking thing" original Latin: rerum singularium ideae non ipsa ideata, sive res perceptas, pro causa agnoscunt, sed ipsum Deum, quatenus est res cogitans, Ethics, Part II, Proposition 5; and this God is also simultaneously the real and active force within them, just as in Malebranche. Since, however, Spinoza uses the name "God" Latin: Deus to designate the world, nothing is ultimately explained by this. At the same time, however, there is in his work, as in Leibniz, a precise parallelism between the extended and the represented world: "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things" original Latin: ordo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo et connexio rerum, Ethics, Part II, Proposition 7 and many similar passages. This is the pre-established harmony original Latin: harmonia praestabilita of Leibniz; except that here the represented world and the objectively existing world do not remain completely separate—corresponding to each other merely by virtue of a harmony regulated in advance and from the outside—but are instead truly one and the same. We have here, therefore, first and foremost a thoroughgoing realism, insofar as the existence of things corresponds exactly to our representation of them, since both are indeed one; accordingly, we perceive things-in-themselves: they are in themselves extended Latin: extensa, just as they also present themselves as extended when they appear as objects of thought Latin: cogitata, that is, in our representation of them. (As an aside, here lies the origin of Schelling’s Identity of the Real and the Ideal.) All of this is now actually grounded only...