In the history of philosophy we meet with Substance as the principle of Spinoza's system. On the import and value of that much-praised and no less decried philosophy there has been great misunderstanding and a deal of talking since the days of Spinoza. The atheism and, as a further charge, the pantheism of the system has formed the commonest ground of accusation. These cries arise because of Spinoza's conception of God as substance, and substance only. What we are to think of this charge follows, in the first instance, from the place which substance takes in the system of the logical idea. Though an essential stage in the evolution of the idea, substance is not the same with absolute Idea, but the idea under the still limited form of necessity. It is true that God is necessity, or, as we may also put it, that He is the absolute Thing: He is however no less the absolute Person. That He is the absolute Person however is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza never reached: and on that side it falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of religious consciousness in Christianity. Spinoza was by descent a Jew; and it is upon the whole the Oriental way of seeing things, according to which the nature of the finite world seems frail and transient, that has found its intellectual expression in his system. This Oriental view of the unity of substance certainly gives the basis for all real further development. Still it is not the final idea. It is marked by the absence of the principle of the Western World, the principle of individuality, which first appeared under a philosophic shape, contemporaneously with Spinoza, in the Monadology of Leibnitz.