The reader will perhaps ask, What has this theology to do with the "joy
continuous and supreme"? We shall presently meet with some deductions
which contribute to it, but it is not difficult to understand that
Spinoza, to use his own word, might call the truths set forth in these
propositions "blessed." Let a man once believe in that God of infinite
attributes of which thought and extension are those by which He
manifests Himself to us; let him see that the opposition between thought
and matter is fictitious; that his mind "is a part of the infinite
intellect of God"; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter
of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and
he will feel a relationship with infinity which will emancipate him.

It is not true that in Spinoza's God there is so little that is positive
that it is not worth preserving. All Nature is in Him, and if the
objector is sincere he will confess that it is not the lack of contents
in the idea which is disappointing, but a lack of contents particularly
interesting to himself.

The opposition between the mind and body of man as two diverse entities
ceases with that between thought and extension. It would be impossible
briefly to explain in all its fulness what Spinoza means by the
proposition: "The object of the idea constituting the human mind is a
body" {39}; it is sufficient here to say that, just as extension and
thought are one, considered in different aspects, so body and mind are
one. We shall find in the fifth part of the Ethic that Spinoza affirms
the eternity of the mind, though not perhaps in the way in which it is
usually believed.

Following the order of the Ethic we now come to its more directly
ethical maxims. Spinoza denies the freedom commonly assigned to the