Having arrived, however, at existence, we soon find ourselves among ideas, which at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as before from the circle of ordinary thought.  Nothing exists except substance, the attributes under which substance is ex expressed, and the modes or affections of those attributes.  There is but one substance self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite all-perfect Being.  Substance cannot produce substance; and, therefore, there is no such thing as creation, and everything which exists, is either an attribute of Him, or an affection of some attribute of Him, modified in this manner or in that.  Beyond Him there is nothing, and nothing like Him or equal to Him; He therefore alone in Himself is absolutely free, uninfiuenced by anything, for nothing is except Himself; and from Him and from His supreme power, essence, intelligence (for all these words mean the same thing) all things have necessarily flowed, and will and must flow on for ever, in the same manner as from the nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right angles.  It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another.  The properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known to ourselves.  But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence; and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents upon it, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of God.

Each attribute is infinite suo genere; and it is time that we should know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important word.  Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God two only are known to us—­“extension,” and “thought,” or “mind.”  Duration, even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is not even a real thing.  It has no relation to being conceived mathematically, in the same way as it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world.  These and everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, sub quadam specie aeternitatis.  But extension, or substance extended, and thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective.  We must not confound extension with body, for though body be a mode of extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself—–­or, in other words, to be limited at all.  And as it is with extension, so it is with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object.  Thus there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end.  All things of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these attributes are produced from God, and in Him they have their being, and without Him they would cease to be.