Thoughts of Spinoza as narrated by Sir Tschirnhaus ( a friend and follower of Spinoza)

Sir Tschirnhaus told me many things about the handwritten book of Spinoza. .. Spinoza's book will be about God, mind, happiness or the idea of the perfect man, the recovery of the mind and the recovery of the body. He asserts the demonstration of a number of things about God. That He alone is free.He supposes that freedom exists, when the action or determination originates not from an external impact, but only from the nature of the actor. In this sense he justly ascribes freedom to God alone.

According to him the mind itself is in a certain sense a part of God. He thinks that there is sense in all things to the degrees of their existence. God is defined by him as an absolutely infinite Being, which contains all perfections, i.e. affirmations or realities or what may be conceived. Likewise only God would be substance or a Being which exists in itself or which can be understood by itself ; all creatures are nothing else than modes. Man is free in so far as he is not determined by any external things. But because this is never the case, man is not free at all, although he participates more in freedom than the bodies.

The mind would be nothing but the idea of the body. He thinks that the unity of the bodies is caused by a sort of pressure.......... He thinks that we will forget most things when we die and retain only those things that we know with the kind of knowledge he calls intutive, of which only a few are conscious. Because knowledge is either sensual or imaginative or intutive. He believes a sort of Pythagorical transmigration , namely that minds go from body to body. He says that Christ is the very best philosopher. He thinks that apart from thought and extension there are an infinity of other positive attributes, but that in all of them there is thought like here in extension . How they are constituted cannot be conceived by us but every one is infinite like space here.

Leibniz