Descartes had already made the will the power of affirmation and negation. Spinoza advances a step further: the affirmation cannot be separated from the idea affirmed, it is impossible to conceive a truth without in the same act affirming it, the idea involves its own affirmation. "Will and understanding are one and the same" (II. _prop_. 49, _cor_.). For Spinoza moral activity is entirely resolved into cognitive activity. To the two stages of knowing, _imaginatio_ and _intellectus_, correspond two stages of willing--desire, which is ruled by imagination, and volition, which is guided by reason. The passive emotions of sensuous desire are directed to perishable objects, the active, which spring from reason, have an eternal object--the knowledge of the truth, the intuition of God. For reason there are no distinctions of persons,--she brings men into concord and gives them a common end (IV. _prop_. 35-37,40),--and no distinctions of time (IV. _prop_. 62, 66), and in the active emotions, which are always good, no excess (IV. _prop_. 61). The passive emotions arise from confused ideas. They cease to be passions, when the confused ideas of the modifications of the body are transformed into clear ones; as soon as we have clear ideas, we become active and cease to be slaves of desire. We master the emotions by gaining a clear knowledge of them. Now, an idea is clear when we cognize its object not as an individual thing, but in its connection, as a link in the causal chain, as necessary, and as a mode of God. The more the mind conceives things in their necessity, and the emotions in their reference to God, the less it is passively subject to the emotions, the more power it attains over them: "Virtue is power" (IV. _def_. 8; _prop_. 20, _dem_.). It is true, indeed, that one emotion can be conquered only by another stronger one, a passive emotion only by an active one. The active emotion by which knowledge gains this victory over the passions is the joyous consciousness of our power (III. _prop_. 58, 59). Adequate ideas conceive their objects in union with God; thus the pleasure which proceeds from knowledge of, and victory over, the passions is accompanied by the idea of God, and, consequently (according to the definition of love), by _love toward God_ (V. _prop_. 15, 32). The knowledge and love of God, together, "intellectual love toward God,"[1] is the highest good and the highest virtue (IV. _prop_. 28). Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. The intellectual love of man toward God, in which the highest peace of the soul, blessedness, and freedom consist, and in virtue of which (since it, like its object and cause, true knowledge, is eternal), the soul is not included in the destruction of the body (V. _prop_. 23, 33), is a part of the infinite love with which God loves himself, and is one and the same with the love of God to man. The eternal part of the soul is reason,