I have had, for my entire life, an extraordinary esteem for the person and for the thinking of that great philosopher. But I do not believe that atti… - Benedictus de Spinoza

I say expressly, that the mind has not an adequate but only a confused knowledge of itself, its own body, and of external bodies, whenever it perceives things after the common order of nature; that is, whenever it is determined from without, namely, by the fortuitous play of circumstance, to regard this or that; not at such times as it is determined from within, that is, by the fact of regarding several things at once, to understand their points of agreement, difference, and contrast. Whenever it is determined in anywise from within, it regards things clearly and distinctly, as I will show below.

He put forth his pantheism in a series of propositions and proofs—and what he hoped to prove was that mind and matter were merely two different manifestations of a single sacred Substance. It took a special kind of mind to deduce Nature’s divinity, step by step, from a simple set of axioms. Never has pantheism been proclaimed in such a punctilious fashion. Never before, and never since, has the world seen such a meticulous mystic.

Sed amor erga rem aeternam et infinitam sola laetitia pascit animum, ipsaque omnis tristitiae est expers; quod valde est desiderandum totisque viribus quaerendum.