THE TERM NATURE.--It would be a misapprehension to suppose that the terms "God" and "Nature" are regarded by Spinoza as interchangeable, though his numerous critics were accustomed to declare that this was the case. On the contrary, Spinoza, in order to anticipate the misunderstanding which he saw might arise on this point, reintroduced into philosophy a pair of terms which the Scholastics had long before brought into currency, but which had since fallen out of fashion--_Natura naturans_ and _Natura naturata_. We might perhaps translate the former of these, "Creative Nature," and the latter, "Created Nature." _Natura naturans_ is equivalent to "Nature as a creative power," or "The creative power immanent in Nature." _Natura naturata_ is equivalent to "Nature as it is when created," or "The results of the creative power immanent in Nature." And the _Natura naturans_ is active in the _Natura naturata_ at all points: the creative power is immanent in creation. As Spinoza puts it in one of his letters: "I assert that God is (as it is called) the immanent, not the external cause of all things. That is to say, I assert with Paul, that in God all things live and move.... But if any one thinks that the _Theologico-Political Treatise_ (one of his works) assumes that God and Nature are one and the same, he is entirely mistaken."[8] Thus, for Spinoza, the order of nature, which had seemed to so many of his contemporaries, from the religious point of view, such a devastating conception, as leaving no room for the spiritual, was itself only explicable if interpreted spiritually. "Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can exist or be conceived without God" (_Ethics_ i. 15) sums up his attitude. All things may be, as the new science taught, 'determined' but they are determined "by the necessity of the divine nature" (_Ethics_ i. 29). THE "ETHICS."--Spinoza may rightly be termed a man of one book. In his _Ethics_ is to be found a complete and final expression of his philosophy. "How boundless," says Goethe of this great book, "is the disinterestedness conspicuous in every sentence, how exalted the resignation which submits itself once for all to the great laws of existence, instead of trying to get through life with the help of trivial consolations; and what an atmosphere of peace breathes through the whole!"