People's bodies are roughly the same, but there are more differences: this person thinks it is good, that person thinks it is evil; this person thinks it is orderly, that person thinks it is chaos; this person feels happy and relieved, that person will express disgust; and so on, there are countless examples.
People often say, "Everyone's heart is different, just like their faces are different." They also say, "Everyone's thoughts are his own." They also say, "Everyone thinks differently and has different preferences." Such proverbs are enough to show that people's judgment of things is entirely based on their own psychological state; they only rely on imagination and ignore rationality.
If they can understand things rationally, they will regard my theory as something like mathematical proof . Even if they don’t feel any fun, they will at least think it is convincing.
Now we have understood that the concepts people are used to explaining nature are just products of imagination, and have nothing to do with the nature of things except to indicate the situation of imagination.
These concepts have names, and they seem to be things that exist independently without imagination. Therefore, we call them imagined existences, not rational existences. In this way we can easily refute those who oppose us based on these imaginations.
For example, many people ask us: If all things come from the necessity of God's most perfect nature, then why are there so many defects in this world, such as rotten and smelly things, ugly things that are unbearable to witness, chaotic things, sinful things, etc.?
My answer is very simple: to judge whether a thing is perfect, it can only be determined based on the nature and power of the thing. Therefore, the perfection of a thing has nothing to do with whether it is pleasing to the eye or beneficial to people.
Someone also asked, since God created man, why don’t people just obey rational guidance? My answer is that God has sufficient materials to create everything from the highest to the lowest level of perfection, that is, God's laws are extremely vast, and everything that God can observe can be created as long as it is the infinite wisdom of God.
——Ethics
[This article is excerpted from the book "Spinoza's Self-Report" (translated by Huang Zhongjing, Tianjin People's Publishing House, 2018 edition)]
