The reader will perhaps ask, What has this theology to do with the “joy continuous and supreme”? We shall presently meet with some deductions which contribute to it, but it is not difficult to understand that Spinoza, to use his own word, might call the truths set forth in these propositions “blessed.” Let a man once believe in that God of infinite attributes of which thought and extension are those by which He manifests Himself to us; let him see that the opposition between thought and matter is fictitious; that his mind “is a part of the infinite intellect of God”; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and he will feel a relationship with infinity which will emancipate him. It is not true that in Spinoza’s God there is so little that is positive that it is not worth preserving. All Nature is in Him, and if the objector is sincere he will confess that it is not the lack of contents in the idea which is disappointing, but a lack of contents particularly interesting to himself. The opposition between the mind and body of man as two diverse entities ceases with that between thought and extension. It would be impossible briefly to explain in all its fulness what Spinoza means by the proposition: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body” {39}; it is sufficient here to say that, just as extension and thought are one, considered in different aspects, so body and mind are one. We shall find in the fifth part of the _Ethic_ that Spinoza affirms the eternity of the mind, though not perhaps in the way in which it is usually believed. Following the order of the _Ethic_ we now come to its more directly ethical maxims. Spinoza denies the freedom commonly assigned to the will, or perhaps it is more correct to say he denies that it is intelligible. The will is determined by the intellect. The idea of the triangle involves the affirmation or volition that its three angles are equal to two right angles. If we understand what a triangle is we are not “free” to believe that it contains more or less than two right angles, nor to act as if it contained more or less than two. The only real freedom of the mind is obedience to the reason, and the mind is enslaved when it is under the dominion of the passions. “God does not act from freedom of the will,” {40a} and consequently “things could have been produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than that in which they have been produced.” {40b}