Ethics

Spinoza's Ethics (1677) is the most ambitious work of philosophy ever attempted in geometric form. Modelled on Euclid, the book is built from definitions and axioms, through propositions and proofs, into a single sustained demonstration of the nature of God, the human mind, the human emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the human freedom that comes from understanding them.

The argument is uncompromising. There is, Spinoza holds, only one substance — God, or Nature, the two are the same thing — and everything that exists is a mode of that one substance. The closing books, on bondage to the affects and on the intellectual love of God, are among the supreme writing in any philosophical tradition.