The whole universe, all individual things, and their active powers are, according to Spinoza, not merely from God, but of God; they constitute the infinite succession of forms in which God reveals Himself, through which He eternally works according to His eternal nature--the soul, as it were, of thinking bodies, the body of the soul extended in space. God is the indwelling, not the external efficient cause of all things; all is in God and moves in God. God as creator and generator of all things is generative or self-producing nature. The whole of nature is animate, and ideas, as bodies, move in eternity on lines running parallel to or intersecting one another. Though the fullness of things which have proceeded from God and which exist in Him are not of an eternal, but of a perishable nature, yet they are not limited or defined by chance, but by the necessity of the divine nature, each in its own way existing or acting within its smaller or larger sphere. The eternal and constant nature of God works in them through the eternal laws communicated to them. Things could, therefore, not be constituted otherwise than they are; for they are the manifestations, entering into existence in an eternal stream, of God in the intimate connection of thought and extension.
What is man's place in this logical system? How is he to act and work? Even he, with all his greatness and littleness, his strength and weakness, his heaven-aspiring mind, and his body subject to the need of sustenance, is nothing more than a form of existence (Modus) of God. Man after man, generation after generation, springs up and perishes, flows away like a drop in a perpetual stream, but his nature, the laws by which he moves bodily and mentally in the peculiar connection of mind and matter, reflect the Divine Being. Especially the human mind, or rather the various modes of thought, the feelings and conceptions of all men, form the eternal reason of God. But man is as little free as things, as the stone which rolls down from the mountain; he has to obey the causes which influence him from within and without. Each of his actions is the product of an infinite series of causes and effects, which he can scarcely discern, much less control and alter at will. The good man and the bad, the martyr who sacrifices himself for a noble object, as well as the execrable villain and the murderer, are all like clay in the hands of God; they act, the one well, the other ill, compelled by their inner nature. They all act from rigid necessity. No man can reproach God for having given him a weak nature or a clouded intellect, as it would be irrational if a circle should complain that God has not given it the nature and properties of the sphere. It is not the lot of every man to be strong-minded, and it lies as little in his power to have a sound mind as a sound body.