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The omnipotence of the one absolutely infinite Being is not shown by temperamental interruptions of the course of events; it is manifested in the immutable and necessary laws by which all things come to pass. Spinoza's conception of the universe, flawlessly operating under necessary laws, effectively disposes of miracles. And to dispose of miracles is one of Spinoza's primary concerns.
The word "divine" does not occur in Prop. xi. Ethices II., from which I quote. But it is implied; because the mind is only a mode or modification of the infinite attribute of thought, which again expresses the eternal Substance in God. I venture a doubt whether "actually existing," though adopted by such authorities as Sir F. Pollock gives, with any distinctness, Spinoza's meaning.
Darwinian biology made man consubstantial with the animal kingdom; Spinoza's metaphysics makes man's body consubstantial with the infinite attribute of extension or matter, and his mind consubstantial with the infinite attribute of thought which is the mind of Nature or God.
Spinoza's relations with the humble folk he stayed with exhibited the modesty and grace of character that endeared him to his intimate friends. When he was tired working in his own room, he would frequently come down to smoke a pipe and chat with his landlady and landlord about the simple affairs that filled their lives. His speech was "sweet and easy;" his manner of a gentle, noble, beauty.
Again, so far from realising Spinoza's faith in God as so literally All in All that there is nothing else but He, they would not tolerate the contact of the Infinite with the finite, of God with the world. Consistently with such prepossessions, they held obstinately to the notion of some beginning, and therefore some ending of the ordered world.
Why the Ethics, in final form, began to circulate privately only two or three years before Spinoza's death, and why his work on The Improvement of the Understanding and his Political Treatise were left unfinished, must remain something of an insoluble philosophico-literary mystery. Discretion, as he had already learned and later formally stated and proved, was not inconsonant with rational valor.
Though Leibnitz thus draws a distinction between his deterministic doctrine and the "fatalism" of Spinoza, he recognizes a second concept of freedom, which completely corresponds to Spinoza's.
Both systems of necessity lead to Spinosism, nay, to all the horrible consequences attributed to it by Spinoza's enemies. O, why did Andrew Fuller quit the high vantage ground of notorious facts, plain durable common sense, and express Scripture, to delve in the dark in order to countermine mines under a spot, on which he had no business to have wall, tent, temple, or even standing-ground!
All Spinoza's major conclusions have been embodied directly or indirectly in what is now known as "the higher criticism" of the Bible, which is the basis of the Modernist movement. It was Spinoza who established the fact that the Pentateuch is not, as it is reputed to be, the work of Moses.
Now, if I am right in my definition of Pantheism as absolutely identifying God with the Universe, so that, in fact, there cannot be anything but God, the inconsistency here noted must be regarded as fatal to the genuineness of the Indian or indeed of any other ancient Pantheism. For the defect proved during many centuries to be incurable, and was not indeed fully removed until Spinoza's time.
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