De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

human mind as absolute. See Rehberg, The Relation of Metaphysics to Religion (Berlin, 1787). For those beginning to philosophize from the mind itself, it is permitted to fix their attention on what is within us, or rather what we ourselves are, and to view it from up close, so to speak, intrinsically. From something certain, one must then proceed further to build firm foundations with cautious reasoning. For there can be nothing at all more certain to us who think than this very Being of ours. Nor can any other measure of certainty be conceived that is tractable to us humans than this: whether something is contained in our Being, and can only be denied if this is denied, such that those things deserve to be called true which stand or fall with our necessary Being, while those things are only true-seeming which rely on nothing but accidents in this Being of ours and are equal to these. But if, on the contrary, they institute the journey of philosophizing from the Infinite, they cannot deny that they are proceeding from a mystery that is for the most part inscrutable, just as Spinoza himself understands God as a substance consisting of infinite attributes (Eth. Def. VII), of which he seemed to himself to have knowledge of only two, namely, that it is thinking and extended (Eth. P. II, prop. 1, 2). And these very two attributes, through which he professed to have as clear an idea of God as of a triangle (Epist. LX, p. 659, Vol. I)—whence could he have truly had knowledge of them? Had he not considered his own mind before all else, he would not have acquired the notion of thinking or of