De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

pure extension anywhere. Having forgotten the origin from which he drew it, he was persuaded that he was intuitively perceiving those two attributes in God, or the Infinite, by a clear idea. Furthermore, if he had set before himself that same contemplation of the mind, or of himself, with deliberate study as that first thing with which one must work and from which one must proceed, he would undoubtedly have been compelled to discern to Velle the Willing, or the spontaneity of willing, as a faculty clearly unique and as primitive in a being that is something to itself as to Cogitare the Thinking. Had this been done, his entire Ethics—which now refers everything to thought and therefore necessarily excludes moral freedom—could not have been formed in any other way regarding what pertains to humans. Indeed, in the theological principles he premised, if he had felt compelled to consider to perfecte (h. e. sancte) velle willing perfectly (i.e., holily) no less than to cogitare thinking or knowing as a primitive pneumatiken spiritual faculty, and thus to count it among the attributes of God of which we can have a clear idea, he would not have thought that the notion of infinite spontaneity, or pure volition, should be exiled from a clear idea of the most perfect.

But the second momentum, which seems to touch the head of the Spinozistic system, must also be indicated. Namely, that doctrine commends itself marvelously by its simplest unity, encompassing absolutely all things through its hen kai pan one and all. Everything seems to be reduced to its one source, from which things do not even emanate, but in which they truly remain, such that that Pantheism could be called a system