According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it might seem by a sort of miracle, dispels the mists that envelop and bewilder it, sees through the multeity of modes, and the isolated pictures of imagination, to the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before that august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude of a finite mind would seem to be resignation, worship, reverence,--deeply shading into the submission of absorption. For in it intellect and will are declared to have no place[5]. With such a statement, we get that first aspect of religion which has found its most imposing representative in the faith of Islam. In every religion there must, however, be more than this: or it would fail to do what all religion essentially does. Sheer dependence_--Schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit_ (as Schleiermacher has named it)--can never be the whole burden of a religious teacher's message. Always--at least in the background--there is a contradictory element--in apparent discrepancy with the first--the deification of the worshipper. And as the Ethics of Spinoza--like every complete system of speculative truth--deals with a problem parallel to, if not even identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and main programme must never let us forget the tacit presuppositions worked out to explicitness, as they are partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect and Will are denied to the _Deus = Natura = Substantia,_ it is meant that the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will can well name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the pronominal distinctions of gender matter nothing here), the separation of will from intellect is a fallacy which can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the lower passions, the affections of weakness; these _as such,_ i. e. as elements of weakness, can have no place in Him. But in God, as in the free man who most resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself, there is--but that also in terms we cannot fathom--abundance of joy--the joy of infinite self-realisation.