MENO
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They may be regarded as the two aspects or expressions under which God or
substance is unfolded to man. Here a step is made beyond the limits of the
Eleatic philosophy. The famous theorem of Spinoza, 'Omnis determinatio est
negatio,' is already contained in the 'negation is relation' of Plato's
Sophist. The grand description of the philosopher in Republic VI, as the
spectator of all time and all existence, may be paralleled with another
famous expression of Spinoza, 'Contemplatio rerum sub specie eternitatis.'
According to Spinoza finite objects are unreal, for they are conditioned by
what is alien to them, and by one another. Human beings are included in
the number of them. Hence there is no reality in human action and no place
for right and wrong. Individuality is accident. The boasted freedom of
the will is only a consciousness of necessity. Truth, he says, is the
direction of the reason towards the infinite, in which all things repose;
and herein lies the secret of man's well-being. In the exaltation of the
reason or intellect, in the denial of the voluntariness of evil (Timaeus;
Laws) Spinoza approaches nearer to Plato than in his conception of an
infinite substance. As Socrates said that virtue is knowledge, so Spinoza
would have maintained that knowledge alone is good, and what contributes to
knowledge useful. Both are equally far from any real experience or
observation of nature. And the same difficulty is found in both when we
seek to apply their ideas to life and practice. There is a gulf fixed
between the infinite substance and finite objects or individuals of
Spinoza, just as there is between the ideas of Plato and the world of
sense.

Removed from Spinoza by less than a generation is the philosopher Leibnitz,
who after deepening and intensifying the opposition between mind and
matter, reunites them by his preconcerted harmony (compare again Phaedrus).
To him all the particles of matter are living beings which reflect on one
another, and in the least of them the whole is contained. Here we catch a
reminiscence both of the omoiomere, or similar particles of Anaxagoras, and