40. Spinoza, like Bacon, found the assumption of ends which things were meant to fulfil in the way of accurate inquiry into what things are (materially) and do. He held Plato and Aristotle cheap as compared with Democritus and Epicurus (_Epist_. LX. 13). Accordingly he considers the individual apart from his vocation as a member of society, the state apart from its office as enabling the individual to fulfil that vocation. Each, so considered, is merely a vehicle of so much power (natural force). On the other hand, he recognises a difference between a higher and lower, a better and worse, state of civil society, and a possibility of seeking the better state because it is understood to be better. And this is to admit the possibility of the course of human affairs being affected by the conception of a final cause. It is characteristic of Spinoza that while he never departs from the principle 'homo naturae pars,' he ascribes to him the faculty of understanding the order of nature, and of conforming to it or obeying it in a new way on account of that understanding. In other words, he recognised the distinction called by Kant the distinction between determination according to law and determination according to the consciousness of law; though in his desire to assert the necessity of each kind of determination he tends to disguise the distinction and to ignore the fact that, if rational determination (or the determination by a conception of a law) is a part of nature, it is so in quite a different sense from determination merely according to laws of nature. As he puts it, the clear understanding that we are parts of nature, and of our position in the universe of things, will yield a new character. We shall only then desire what is ordained for us and shall find rest in the truth, in the knowledge of what is necessary. This he regards as the highest state of the individual, and the desire to attain it he evidently considers the supreme motive by which the individual should be governed. The analogue in political life to this highest state of the individual is the direction of the 'imperium' by a 'libera multitudo' to the attainment of 'pax vitaeque securitas' in the high sense which he attaches to those words in _Tract. Pol_. cap. V. [1]