Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and he found his exposition of the rules of knowing already bespeaking the things known; so that if lie had completed his theory of Method, he would have told, in the process, the substantive truth which was professedly waiting to take shape from it. Except to a mind preoccupied by his metaphysical conceptions, his
Emendation can bring no conviction, and afford guidance only by its incidental lights. To this organic inseparability of form and matter Avenarius ascribes the unfinished state of the
Emendation treatise. Spinoza
had to break off, because, when he came to define the intellect, he could not do it without resort to Ms metaphysical system for which he was only preparing the way: and
this difficulty forced him to see, that a doctrine of the intellect could not be a prelude to his metaphysics, inasmuch as it can arise only as their result. 1 Certain it is that, after having both undertakings in progress together, and setting his hand now to one of them and now to the other, the earlier and more forward one was outstripped by the later, and dropping at last out of the race, never reached the goal. 1 Avenarius, op. til. ]i. 49. CHAPTER 111. AT VOORBURG?1663-1670. Is April 1663 we find Spinoza removing his furniture to the village of Voorburg, about two miles from the Hague. He did not himself settle there till June; but visited Amsterdam, to make arrangements for the publication of his Geometrical Proof of the Cartesian Principia, and his Metaphysical Thoughts.1 He engaged Meyer to revise the style and to write a preface, disclaiming for the author more than a partial assent to the doctrines of Descartes which he expounded. He gives an interesting measure of his rate of work when he tells us that it took him two weeks (apparently during his visit) to red…
