Thus, then, the ground was prepared for Spinoza, as a pantheistic monist, to conceive God under the two attributes of Extension and Thought, each in its own way disclosing his essence as no other than infinite Power. But why should God have, or consist of, two attributes and no more? There is a good reason why _we_ should know only those two. It is that we are ourselves modes of Thought united to modes of Extension, of which our thoughts are the revealing ideas. But it would be gross anthropomorphism to impose the limitations of our knowledge on the infinite being of God, manifested through those very attributes as unlimited Power. The infinite of co-existence, which is space, the infinite of causal procession, which is time, suggest an infinity of unimaginable but not inconceivable attributes of which the one divine substance consists. And here at last we get the explanation of why there should be such things as Thought and Extension at all. They are there simply because everything is. If I grant {53} anything--and I must, at least, grant myself--I grant existence, which, having nothing outside itself, must fill up all the possibilities of being which only exclude the self-contradictory from their domain. Thus, the philosophy of Spinoza neither obliges him to believe in the monsters of mythology nor in the miracles of Scripture, nor in the dogmas of Catholic theology, nor even in free-will; nor, again, would it oblige him to reject by anticipation the marvels of modern science. For, according to him, the impossibility of really incredible things could be deduced with the certainty of mathematical demonstration from the law of contradiction itself.