De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

He had perceived that the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature was necessary for him to understand the true good. I wish, however, that the Philosopher had begun his science from the acquisition of this very knowledge of the mind, by separating those things which he discovered in his own mind to be subject to variations from the necessary and universal ideas which shine like a beacon, unmoved, for a man investigating the true good—that is, for one who is to follow practical reason and its absolute dictates, and who is to embrace most willingly not that prudence accommodated to vain and fleeting circumstances, but a holiness that is, as the Apostle says (1 John 2:17), not to be changed for eternity. But the method of that age was different. It was an inveterate habit, as if transfused into Spinoza from Descartes, that a start must always be made by constructing metaphysics, and that the to Esse the Being of things must be explained before all else. The knowledge of our mind leads to God through necessary arguments. But those mortals who are able to ascend from the former to the latter do not descend with equal success from the infinite to the finite. They begin, in fact, with that which, because it is more remote from our knowledge, the human imagination seems to itself to grasp more easily than reason does. Once this is done, if an error is admitted into the metaphysical treatment of the Infinite, it is both very difficult to detect and yet subtly insinuates itself into all the remaining articles of the system. Hence, having become more cautious than the dangers faced by the older philosophers, they have taught more correctly and happily that all moral doctrine should be independent of metaphysical dogmas, derived from that which exists in the