nnexion with the unity of the whole, and hence it cannot see them in
their true relation to each other. "I assert expressly," says Spinoza,
"that the mind has no adequate conception either of itself or of
external things, but only a confused knowledge of them, so long as it
perceives them only in the common order of nature, i.e. so long as it
is _externally determined_ to contemplate this or that object by the
accidental concourse of things, and so long as it is not _internally_
determined by the unity of thought in which it considers a number of
things to understand their agreements, differences and
contradictions."[33]

Vices of abstraction and imagination.

There are two kinds of errors which are usually supposed to exclude
each other, but which Spinoza finds to be united in opinion. These are
the errors of abstraction and imagination; the former explains its
vice by defect, the latter its vice by excess. On the one hand,
opinion is abstract and one-sided; it is defective in knowledge and
takes hold of things only at one point. On the other hand, and just
because of this abstractness and one-sidedness, it is forced to give
an artificial completeness and independence to that which is
essentially fragmentary and dependent. The word "abstract" is
misleading, in so far as we are wont to associate with abstraction the
idea of a mental effort by which parts are separated from a given
whole; but it may be applied without violence to any imperfect
conception, in which things that are really elements of a greater
whole are treated as if they were _res completae_, independent
objects, complete in themselves. And in this sense the ordinary
consciousness of man is often the victim of abstractions when it
supposes itself most of all to be dealing with realities. The essences
and substances of the schoolman may delude him, but he cannot think
these notions clearly without seeing that they are only abstract
elements of reality, and that they have a meaning only in relation to
the other elements of it. But common sense remains unconscious of its
abstractness because imagination gives a kind of substantiality to the
fragmentary and limited, and so makes it possible to conceive it as an
independent reality. Pure intelligence seeing the part as it is in
itself could never see it but as a part. Thought, when it rises to
clearness and distinctness in regard to a