Spinoza Nature as God

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]The first of these is that nature, capital N, as the object of knowledge is capable of being the source of constant good and a rule of life and thus has all the properties and the functions which the Jewish Christian tradition attributed to God. He was since entitled to confer upon it the name natura sive Deus. For nature as he conceived it carried with it all the emotional associations and all the moral force and authority found in the older religious view of God. It provided an immutable end and law for conduct and it was the source, when rationally known, of perfect peace and unqualified security.

[00:00:40]Nature was naturally, that is rationally known, and knowledge of it was such a perfect good that when it takes possession of the human mind, the lesser and otherwise disturbing objects of affection and passion are so well included within it as to fall into their proper place of subordination, that is, of complete control. The second consideration is that Spinoza exemplifies with extraordinary completeness the nature of the problem of all modern philosophies which have not deserted the classic tradition and yet have made the conclusions of modern science their own. What makes Spinoza so admirably the exponent of this problem is that he adopted with ardor and without the reservations displayed by most modern thinkers the essential elements in the great tradition of intellectualism and naturalism. The Hebrew Christian idea of the priority and primacy of the properties of ultimate being, capital B, which concern the control of human affection and endeavor and the method and conclusions of the new natural science as he saw them. The reluctance of other thinkers to follow the model of solution of their common problems which he offered was not, however, wholly due to their desire to save portions of the older moral and religious tradition that he was willing to surrender for what seemed to him a greater and more enduring good, the unification of science with an ethical religious control of the springs of human conduct. There were difficulties from the side of science itself. Its experimental trend, as distinct from its mathematical strain, was adverse to Spinoza's unquestioning faith that the logical order and connection of ideas is one with the order and connection of existence. For as the new science developed, the experimental necessity for sense data and verification by observation reduced the role of logical and mathematical conceptions from a primary to a secondary rank.

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