e merely distinctions in degree. But why is not everything absolutely
perfect? Why are there lesser degrees of reality? Two answers are given.
The first is found only between the lines: the imperfections in the
being and action of individual things are grounded in their finitude,
particularly in their involution in the chain of causality, in virtue of
which they are acted on from without, and are determined in their action
not by their own nature only, but also by external causes. Man sins because
he is open to impressions from external things, and only superior natures
are strong enough to preserve their rational self-determination in spite
of this. The other answer is expressly given at the end of the first part
(with an appeal to the sixteenth proposition, that everything which
the divine understanding conceives as creatable has actually come into
existence). "To those who ask why God did not so create all men that they
should be governed only by reason, I reply only: because matter was not
lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest
to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature were so ample
as so suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite
intellect." All possible degrees of perfection have come into being,
including sin and error, which represent the lowest grade. The universe
forms a chain of degrees of perfection, of which none must be wanting:
particular cases of defect are justified by the perfection of the whole,
which would be incomplete without the lowest degree of perfection, vice
and wickedness. Here we see Spinoza following a path which Leibnitz was to
broaden out into a highway in his _Theodicy_. Both favor the quantitative
view of the world, which softens the antitheses, and reduces distinctions
of kind to distinctions of degree. Not till Kant was the qualitative view
of the world, which had been first brought into ethics by Christianity,
restored to its rights. An ethics which denies freedom and evil is nothing
but a physics of morals.

In his _theory of the state_ Spinoza follows Hobbes pretty closely, but
rejects absolutism, and declares democracy, in which each is obedient to
self-imposed law, to be the form of government most in accordance with
reason. (So in the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_, while in the later
_Tractatus Politicus_ he gives the preference to aristocracy.) In
accordance with the supreme right of nature each ma