and cause; and the end of the subjective mind is to be directed on Him. This is therefore the purest, but also a universal morality. In the thirty-sixth Letter (pp. 581-582) Spinoza speaks of Evil. The allegation is made that God, as the originator of all things and everything, is also the originator of evil, is consequently Himself evil; in this identity all things are one, good and evil are in themselves the same thing, in God’s substance this difference has disappeared. Spinoza says in answer to this: “I assert the fact that God absolutely and truly” (as cause of Himself) “is the cause of everything that has an essential content” (_i.e._ affirmative reality) “be it what it may. Now if you can prove to me that evil, error, crime, etc., are something that expresses an essence, I will freely admit to you that God is the originator of crime and evil and error. But I have elsewhere abundantly demonstrated that the form of evil cannot subsist in anything that expresses an essence, and therefore it cannot be said that God is the cause of evil.” Evil is merely negation, privation, limitation, finality, mode—nothing in itself truly real. “Nero’s murder of his mother, in so far as it had positive content, was no crime. For Orestes did the same external deed, and had in doing it the same end in view—to kill his mother; and yet he is not blamed,” and so on. The affirmative is the will, the intention, the act of Nero. “Wherein then consists Nero’s criminality? In nothing else but that he proved himself ungrateful, merciless, and disobedient. But it is certain that all this expresses no essence, and therefore God was not the cause of it, though He was the cause of Nero’s action and intention.” These last are something positive, but yet they do not constitute the crime as such; it is only the negative element, such as mercilessness, etc. that makes the action a crime. “We know that whatever exists, regarded in itself and without taking anything else into consideration, contains a perfection which extends as widely as the essence of the thing itself extends, for the essence is in no way different therefrom.”—“Because then,” we find in the thirty-second letter (pp. 541, 543), “God does not regard things abstractly, or form general definitions,” (of what the thing ought to be) “and no more reality is required of things than the Divine understanding and power has given and actually meted out to them; therefore it clearly follows that such privation exists only and solely in respect to our understanding, but not in respect to God;” for God is absolutely real. It is all very well to say this, but it does not meet the case. For in this way God and the respect to our understanding are different. Where is their unity? How is this to be conceived? Spinoza continues in the thirty-sixth letter: “Although the works of the righteous (_i.e._ of those who have a clear idea of God, to which they direct all their actions and even