Part One: On God Summary and Analysis

The Ethics concerns metaphysics, epistemology, the nature of the mind, morality and human freedom. The beginning of the ethics, however, starts with Spinoza's conception of God. The idea of the human must be understood in terms of the divine. So Spinoza builds a structure through which human nature can be fully understood. Spinoza must begin with the ultimate ground of being, or the most basic part of reality. The basic structure of reality is substance or what he calls God. God is known as both substance and as cause. God as a cause will determine all the other events in the universe in history necessarily (call this view determinism).

A substance, for Spinoza, has independent existence. This means that it can exist by itself. Think about it as the real-world equivalent of a noun. The...