De Animalibus Insectis Libri Septem

by the reality of its own nature to be identified. Whether this is the case or not, however, is the very knot, the very reef, which cannot be removed or moved from the middle by a conceived formal unity and by that ideal identity of subject and object.

But it is nevertheless very tempting to take the unity of the ideal object with the subject, which truly exists while you are thinking, for a real unity that is also necessary outside the form of thinking. Furthermore, it is tempting for those who are occupied primarily in thinking—namely, philosophers—to apply that necessary reduction of diverse things to unity in the act of thinking, or enthymeme a syllogism with a missing premise, and the elevation of special reasons and laws to one principal reason, which they call the supreme principle, even to things insofar as they are forced to conceive of them as existing. That is, insofar as something is attributed to them by the very act of thinking, by which they are posited as existing outside of thought. If anyone does this application fully and purely, he will reduce the to pan the all in existence to the to en the one. For he has become accustomed in thinking always to consider two different things under a certain intuition as one; and so, while he thinks, he proceeds to infinity. Now, therefore, he transfers (as indeed very similar things can be confused for some time even by the most sagacious) the formal method of thinking beyond its own boundaries, that is, to the connection of existing things. He takes the law of thinking for the law of existing. Once this is obtained or conceded, no system could ever be conceived as truer or more consistent with itself than that of Spinoza.