a defect in the external form; but it is the fundamental defect of the whole position. In this method the nature of philosophic knowledge and the object thereof, are entirely misconceived, for mathematical knowledge and method are merely formal in character and consequently altogether unsuited for philosophy. Mathematical knowledge exhibits its proof on the existent object as such, not on the object as conceived; the Notion is lacking throughout; the content of Philosophy, however, is simply the Notion and that which is comprehended by the Notion. Therefore this Notion as the knowledge of the essence is simply one assumed, which falls within the philosophic subject; and this is what represents itself to be the method peculiar to Spinoza’s philosophy. Of this demonstrative manner we have already seen these examples: (α) The definitions from which Spinoza takes his start—as in geometry a commencement is made with the line, triangle, &c.—concern universal determinations, such as cause of itself, the finite, substance, attribute, mode, and so on, which are solely and simply accepted and assumed, not deduced, nor proved to be necessary: for Spinoza is not aware of how he arrives at these individual determinations. (β) He further speaks of axioms, for instance (Ethic. P. I. Ax. I. p. 36): “What is, is either in itself or in another.” The determinations “in itself” and “in another” are not shown forth in their necessity: neither is this disjunction proved, it is merely assumed. (γ) The propositions have, as such, a subject and predicate which are not similar. When the predicate is proved of the subject and necessarily combined with it, the discrepancy remains that the one as universal is related to the other as particular: therefore even although the relation is proved, there is present at the same time a secondary relation. Mathematical science, in its true propositions respecting a whole, escapes from the difficulty by proving also the converse of the propositions, in this way obtaining for them a special definiteness by proving each proposition in both ways. True propositions may, therefore, be looked on as definitions, and the conversion is the proof of the proposition in the form in which it is expressed. But this means of escaping the difficulty Philosophy cannot well employ, since the subject of which something is proved is itself only the Notion or the universal, and the proposition form is therefore quite superfluous and out of place. What has the form of the subject is in the form of an existent thing, as contrasted with the universal, the content of the proposition. The existent thing is taken as signifying existent in the ordinary sense; it is the word which we use in every-day life, and of which we have a conception that has nothing of the Notion in it. The converse of a proposition would simply read like this: The Notion is that which is thus popularly conceived. This proof from the usage of