Appendices and Omissions

through mere assertion. The presentation is already indistinct due to the ambiguity of the word "God" original Latin: Deus, which is used in a completely improper sense; moreover, he loses himself in darkness, and in the end it says: "nor can I explain these things more clearly at present." original Latin: nec impraesentiarum haec clarius possum explicare. Indistinctness of presentation, however, always arises from an indistinctness in one's own understanding and thinking through of philosophical principles German: Philosopheme. Specific philosophical propositions or doctrines.. Very aptly, Vauvenargues said: "Clarity is the good faith of philosophers." original French: La clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes. (See Revue des deux Mondes August 15, 1853, p. 635.) What "pure composition" German: reine Satz. Referring to the strict rules of musical harmony and counterpoint. is in music, perfect clarity is in philosophy, insofar as it is the indispensable condition original Latin: conditio sine qua non without whose fulfillment everything loses its value, and we must say: "whatever you show me in this way, I disbelieve and detest." original Latin: quodcumque ostendis mihi sic incredulus odi. A quote from Horace’s Ars Poetica regarding unbelievable fictions. One must, after all, carefully prevent possible misunderstandings through clarity even in matters of ordinary, practical life; how then should one be allowed to express oneself indefinitely, even enigmatically, in the most difficult, most abstruse, and scarcely attainable object of thought: the tasks of philosophy? The criticized obscurity in Spinoza's doctrine arises from the fact that he did not proceed impartially from the nature of things as they present themselves, but rather from Cartesianism, and accordingly from all sorts of traditional concepts such as God original Latin: Deus, substance original Latin: substantia, perfection original Latin: perfectio, etc., which he then endeavored, through detours, to bring into harmony with his truth. Especially in the second part of the Ethics, he very often expresses the best points only indirectly, by always speaking through circumlocutions original Latin: per ambages and almost allegorically. On the other hand, Spinoza displays an unmistakable transcendental idealism The philosophical view that our experience of things is about how they appear to us, not about those things as they are in themselves., namely a knowledge (even if only general) of the truths clearly set forth by Locke and especially by Kant; that is, a real distinction between the appearance German: Erscheinung and the thing in itself German: Ding an sich. The essence of an object as it exists independently of human perception., and an acknowledgment that only the former is accessible to us. See Ethics, Part II, proposition 16 with the second corollary; proposition 17, scholium An explanatory note or commentary.; proposition 18, scholium; proposition 19; proposition 23, which extends this to self-knowledge; proposition 25, which states it clearly; and finally, as a summary original French: résumé, the corollary to proposition 29, which clearly states that we recognize neither ourselves nor things as they are in themselves, but merely as they appear. The demon-