Spinoza declares his belief in the eternity of mind. The twenty-second
and twenty-third propositions of the fifth part are as follows:-

"In God, nevertheless, there necessarily exists an idea which expresses
the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity."

"The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but
something of it remains which is eternal."

The word "nevertheless" is a reference to the preceding proposition
which denies the continuity of memory or imagination excepting so long
as the body lasts. The demonstration of the twenty-third proposition is
not easy to grasp, but the substance of it is that although the mind is
the idea of the body, that is to say, the mind is body as thought and
body is thought as extension, the mind, or essence of the body, is not
completely destroyed with the body. It exists as an eternal idea, and
by an eternal necessity in God. Here again we must not think of that
personality which is nothing better than a material notion, an image
from the concrete applied to mind, but we must cling fast to thought, to
the thoughts which alone makes us what we ARE, and these, says Spinoza,
are in God and are not to be defined by time. They have always been and
always will be. The enunciation of the thirty-third proposition is,
"The intellectual love of God which arises from the third kind of
knowledge is eternal." The "third kind of knowledge" is that intuitive
science which "advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of
certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of
things; {54} "No love except intellectual love is eternal," {55a} and
the scholium to this proposition adds, "If we look at the common opinion
of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of
their minds, but they confound it with duration, and attribute it to