A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking on these matters is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly speak of it as being probable, or as being improbable.  Probability extends only to what we can imagine as possible, and Spinoza’s theory seems to lie beyond the range within which our judgment can exercise itself; in our own opinion, indeed, as we have already said, the entire subject is one with which we have no business; and the explanation of it, if it is ever to be explained to us, is reserved till we are in some other state of existence.  We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is in itself incredible.  The chances may be millions to one against his being right, yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably at least as strange as his conception of it.  But we are firmly convinced that of these questions, and all like them, practical answers only lie within the reach of human faculties; and that in all such “researches into the absolute” we are on the road which ends nowhere.

Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to this philosophy itself, there is one most obvious, viz., that if the attributes of God be infinite, and each particular thing is expressed under them all, then mind and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each of ourselves; and this human nature exists (i.e., there exists corresponding modes of substance) in the whole infinity of the divine nature under attributes differing each from each, and all from mind and all from body.  That this must be so, follows obviously from the definition of the Infinite Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two attributes which are known to us; and if this be so, why does not the mind perceive something of all these other attributes?  The objection is well expressed by a correspondent (Letter 67):—­“It follows from what you say,” he writes to Spinoza, “that the modification which constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, although it be one and the same modification, yet must be expressed in an infinity of ways; one way by thought, a second way by extension, a third by some attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the attributes being infinite in number, and the order and connection of modes being the same in them all; why, then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one attribute only?”

Spinoza’s answer is curious:  unhappily a fragment of his letter only is extant, so that it is too brief to be satisfactory.

“In reply to your difficulty,” he says, “although each particular thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes, the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite minds.  No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connection with another.”

He means, we suppose, that God’s mind only perceives, or can perceive, things under their Infinite expression, and that the idea of each several mode, under whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.