Platonic Theory of Ideas

What we take to be independent, substantive entities, whether physical or mental, must ultimately evince themselves as deriva tive "modes" or states (affectiones) of the one absolute Being, ways in which that one absolute Being expresses or manifests itself, and which "follow from" it as consequents from ground. Using the Cartesian term "Attribute" to express "that which intellect appre hends of Substance as constituting its essence," Spinoza conceives that the concrete nature of God demands for its expression an infinite variety of Attributes, although to the human intellect He is manifested under two Attributes only, extension and thought or consciousness (cogitatio). There are not, however, two realms, a realm of extension and a realm of consciousness; it is one and the same reality that manifests both aspects. All res particulares are, regarded from one point of view, modes of extension, and regarded from another point of view, modes of consciousness.

Spinoza and Knowledge.

Knowledge would, then, accord ing to Spinoza, attain its ideal were it able to present the whole content of that which is to be known as an orderly system of consequents following from the supreme ground. But between this ideal of knowledge to which rational reflexion leads and the knowledge of the world acquired in ordinary human experience there would seem to be a wide gulf, of which Spinoza was fully sensible. No distinction is more frequently emphasised by him than that between what he calls imagination (imaginatio) or belief (opinio), the equivalent of the Platonic term 66Ea and reason (ratio). Under the former term he includes not only sense-perception but memory, as also the generic images and general concepts such as are hastily and confusedly attained through the vague experience (experientia vaga) of everyday life. Such knowledge is always "inadequate"—incomplete and partial. We know external objects, for example, only in so far as they affect our bodily organism, but not in the innumerable relations in which they stand to other things; we apprehend them as torn from their context, and in a fragmentary fashion.

The more, however, our knowledge advances, the less possible is it for us to rest content with this confused picturing of imag ination. When the stage of ratio is reached, we have become pos sessed of common notions (notiones communes) and "adequate" ideas of the properties of things—ideas of what all things have in common and of what is alike in the part and in the whole. If there be any characteristic which is common to all things in so far as they are corporeal or in so far as they are conscious, then, when we have determined such a property, our knowledge will be, so far as it goes, adequate. Science starts with such common notions and endeavours to construct a coherent account of the universe by a process of deductive inference, the validity of which is guaranteed by the nature of intellect itself, for it is the essential mark of the intellect to perform the function of deduction accurately.

Yet even this is not the highest stage of intellectual appre hension. Science begins and remains throughout within the region of general laws or principles. It enables us to understand the universal and necessary interconnection on which the eternal order and coherence of the universe is based; it does not enable us to grasp the concrete individuality of things, nor their specific man ner of connectedness in the whole. Finally, then, in what Spinoza

called intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), the concrete in dividualities of imaginative experience are restored, but at a higher level,—a level where individual things are no longer con ceived fragmentarily and in isolation, but in their relationship to and in their dependence upon the infinite ground. Such knowledge is intuitive not in the sense of being prior to or independent of reasoning, but in the sense of being the culmination of inferential knowledge, when we are able at a glance to see the relation of the part to the whole.

In Spinoza's system what it has now become customary to call the coherence theory of truth obtains, for the first time, definite form and expression. The theory so named differs from the Car tesian conception of knowledge as a building made up of separate bits of truth and also from the conception of mere consistency, employed by formal logic. For it is the conception, on the one hand, of a system of truth, not of truths, and, on the other hand, of a significant whole which is manifested in all the concrete articulations of its structure. Knowledge, so regarded, implies systematic coherence,—such connection among the parts of that which is known as constitutes them to a large extent what they are. Each known fact is as known related to innumerable other facts; and complete knowledge of it would be the representation in thought of all the possible relations by which its place and function are determined.

Thus the fundamental idea involved in knowledge is not that of a collective sum of being, but the idea of the essence of reality, of that which manifests itself in the particulars, and which is like wise involved in all our thinking. Our knowledge is itself a part of the system of things, in and through it the essence of the system is consciously realised. There is, indeed, no contrast to be drawn between truth and reality; the true is the real and the real is the true. Ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et con nexio rerum. There are, indeed, degrees of reality and of truth. Just as no finite thing can be completely real, although one finite thing may be more real than another, so the content of no single human judgment can be completely true, although one may be truer than another. If we take our ideas for no more than what they are, they do not deceive us. In their own context and order, even imaginative ideas are so far true.

Error arises through our misinterpretation of imaginative ex perience, through our tendency of conceiving the fragmentary things thus recognised as res completae, as complete in them selves. From the fact, for example, that external things affect our sensory nerves, we are aware of sensations of colour and sound etc. But since we are ignorant of the mechanism occasioning these effects, we ascribe the sense-qualities in question directly to the external things themselves, although these external things are at most only in part their causes. Most critics would, however, agree that this solution of the problem of error throws into relief one of the main difficulties of Spinoza's theory. Errors and illusions are, after all, not mere "negations"; there is a positive factor involved in them which must in some way be grounded in the nature of the real. And it is impossible to find that ground in Substance, as Spinoza conceived it.