Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say _is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We are to see, however, what these _ideae_ are which are offered to us as self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them, in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_, and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to 'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:-- DEFINITIONS. 1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which cannot be conceived except as existing. 2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by body. 3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the conception of anything else as the cause of it. 4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance as constituting the essence of substance. 5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in something else, by and through which it is conceived. 6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and infinite essence. EXPLANATION. I say _absolutely_ infinite, not infinite _suo genere_--for of what is infinite _suo genere_ only, the attributes are not infinite but finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which involves no impossibility.