y are correlative. Or if he did
see it (as seems possible from a passage in his earliest
treatise),[45] he regarded the correlation as merely subjective,
merely belonging to our thought. They are to him only the two
attributes which we happen to know out of the infinite number
belonging to God. There is no necessity that the substance should
manifest itself in just these attributes and no others, for abstract
substance is equally receptive of all determinations, and equally
indifferent to them all. Just because the unity is merely generic, the
differences are accidental, and do not form by their union any
complete whole. If Spinoza had seen that matter in itself is the
correlative opposite of mind in itself, he need not have sought by
abstracting from the difference of these elements to reach a unity
which is manifested in that very difference, and his absolute would
have been not substance but spirit. This idea he never reached, but we
find him approximating to it in two ways. On the one hand, he condemns
the Cartesian conception of matter as passive and self-external, or
infinitely divisible--as, in short, the mere opposite of thought.[46]
And sometimes he insists on the parallelism of extension and thought
at the expense of their opposition in a way that almost anticipates
the assertion by Leibnitz of the essential identity of mind and
matter. On the other hand, he recognizes that this parallelism is not
complete. Thought is not like a picture; it is conscious, and
conscious not only of itself, but of extension. It transcends
therefore the absolute distinction between itself and other
attributes. It is only because he cannot rid himself of the phantom of
an extended matter as a thing in itself, which is entirely different
from the idea of it, that Spinoza is prevented from recognising in
mind that unity that transcends all distinctions, even its own
distinction from matter. As it is, his main reason for saying that
intelligence is not an attribute of God, but merely a mode, seems to
be this, that the thought of God must be conceived as producing its
own object, i.e. as transcending the distinction of subject and object
which is necessary to our intelligence.[47] But this argument of
itself points to a concrete quite as much as to an abstract unity. It
is as consistent with the idea of absolute spirit as with that of
absolute substance. Spinoza's d