Note 419 — Chapter VIII · PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (B) THE MAGIAN SOUL

All the elements of the Magian metaphysic are to be found in Spinoza, hard as he tried to replace the Arabian-Jewish conceptual world of his Spanish masters (and above all Moses Maimonides) by the Western of early Baroque. The individual human mind is for him not an ego, but only a mode of the one divine attribute, the “cogitatio”—which is just the Pneuma. He protests against notions like “God’s Will.” His God is pure substance and in lieu of the dynamic causality of the Faustian universe he discovers simply the logic of the divine cogitatio. All this is already in Porphyry, in the Talmud, in Islam; and to Faustian thinkers like Leibniz and Goethe it is as alien as anything can possibly be. (Allgem. Gesch. d. Philos. in Kultur der Gegenwart, I, v, p. 484, Windelband.)