324 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



that knowledge depends on the conviction that unity 

 and order pervades everything, need not occupy us at 

 present. The fact that he identified this principle of 

 unity and order with the personal Deity of religion 

 permitted him to bring spiritual and natural knowledge 

 into connection and gave to his philosophy a twofold 

 interest. For it was capable of being on the one side 

 mystically interpreted by spiritual thinkers, whilst on 

 the other side the emphasis laid upon mathematical 

 reasoning attracted those who had successfully begun to 

 explain mechanically many phenomena in nature. 

 Whilst the former line of thought led to the religious 

 conception that we know and " see all things in God " 

 (Malebranche), the mechanical philosophers on the other 

 side recognised that for their purposes the supposition of 

 a definite (mechanical) order in the universe was all that 

 was wanted, and that the task of the natural philosopher 

 consisted in tracing in detail some lines of this inwoven 

 cypher of all Reality. Towards this Descartes had already 

 made a beginning in his celebrated theory of Vortices. 

 But the thinker who most consistently devoted himself 

 to carrying forward the line of thought suggested by 

 Descartes, viz., the ascent through abstract thought to a 

 conception of the true order and unity of the world, and 

 the working of this by a mathematical method, was 

 25. Spinoza, whose writings, however, acquired their import- 

 ance in modern philosophy much later, and need not 

 occupy us at present. A more striking immediate 

 reaction upon the course of thought on the Continent 

 than was exercised by the philosophy of Spinoza, who 

 nevertheless influenced contemporary thinkers more than 



