GENERAL PRINCIPLES 25 



thinking Ego, without any specific thought. If we 

 challenge the reality of this instrument, we do so by 

 means of the instrument itself, and so involve ourselves 

 in self-contradiction. The thinking Ego cannot be thought 

 non-existent : to think its non-existence would be a con- 

 tradiction in terms-. Spinoza's advance upon 1 this was 

 merely to pass from Descartes's practical method of 

 attaining truth (namely, the discarding: of specific deter- 

 minations) to the general metaphysical principle which 

 the method implied, the principle, namely, that the 

 essence or reality of a thing is that which remains after 

 the differences in its states and qualities have been 

 thought away, or that which is common to all its forms 

 and manifestations, and consequently that the ultimate 

 reality or substance is that which is free from all specific 

 determinations, that which includes or is common to 

 everything because it is not (specially) anything. 



Now when we rigorously apply this principle,, that the 

 reality of substance is that which remains after all 

 specific or differential qualities have been removed, we 

 are left with nothing but quantity either, as in. the case 

 of Spinoza, quantity of substance in general l ; or, as 

 in the case of Descartes, quantity of a specific substance, 

 that is to say quantity of one quality. Thus Descartes's 

 position is that in addition to the one true and perfect 

 substance, God, whose existence is externally uncon- 

 ditioned, there are two created substances, whose exis- 

 tence is not conditioned by anything finite, but by infinite 



1 It is true that Spinoza regards substance as indivisible, in the 

 sense that it has no real parts ; and this may seem inconsistent 

 with the contention that Spinoza's substance is merely quantita- 

 tive. But the contradiction is Spinoza's : it is a fragment of the 

 great fissure of inconsistency that traverses his whole system, 

 namely, the confounding of a substance possessing infinite attri-|| 

 butes with a substance whose reality is reached by the exclusion |1 

 of all specific determinations. If we hold strictly to the second of 

 these views of substance, then substance can be said to be in- 

 divisible only on the ground that there is nothing to divide. Cf. 

 Spinoza, Ethics, Part i. prop. 12 and 13, with Tractatus de Intettectus 

 Emendations, 108, ii. iii. 



