He is then absolute power in contrast to wisdom, which sets up definite aims, and consequently limitations; particular aims, thoughts of what is about to come to pass, and the like are therefore put out of the question. But beyond this universal, no advance is made; for it must be noticed as specially singular, that Spinoza in the fiftieth Letter (Oper. T. I. p. 634) says that every determination is a negation. Moreover, if God is the cause of the world, it is implied that He is finite; for the world is here put beside God as something different from Him. b. The greatest difficulty in Spinoza is, in the distinctions to which he comes, to grasp the relation of this determinate to God, at the same time preserving the determination. “God is a thinking Being, because all individual thoughts are modes which express God’s nature in a certain and determinate manner; there pertains therefore to God an attribute the conception of which all individual thoughts involve, and by means of this they also are conceived. God is an extended Being for the same reason.” This means that the same substance, under the attribute of thought, is the intelligible world, and under the attribute of extension, is nature; nature and thought thus both express the same Essence of God. Or, as Spinoza says, “The order and system of natural things is the same as the order of the thoughts. Thus, for instance, the circle which exists in nature, and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, are one and the same thing” (they are one and the same content), “which is” merely “expressed by means of different attributes. If we therefore regard nature either under the attribute of extension or of thought, or under any other attribute whatever, we shall find one and the same connection of causes, _i.e._, the same sequence of things. The formal Being of the idea of the circle can be conceived only by means of the mode of thought, as its proximate cause, and this mode again by means of another, and so on infinitely; so that we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the connection of causes, by the attribute of thought alone, and if things are considered by the attribute of extension, they must be considered only by the attribute of extension,—and the same holds good of other causes.”[198] It is one and the same system, which at one time appears as nature, and at another time in the form of thought.