We know nothing, and can know nothing, of God beyond this: He has no will, or his will is mere intelligence or thought; He has no law, or His law is merely His thought embodied in the arrangements of nature; He has no moral properties that are cognizable by the human faculties.

It follows that God is not the creator of the world, for creation implies an act of will, and God has no will; that He is not the Lawgiver or Governor of the world, for there is no law emanating from a superior, but such only as is created by _human compact or agreement_, and there is "no natural obligation to obey God," no invariable standard of right and wrong.

The principles which are thus assumed in regard to the nature of God are afterwards applied to many important questions, relating, first, to the soul of man; secondly, to the science of Ethics; thirdly, to the doctrine of political right and liberty; and, fourthly, to the supposed claims of Revelation.

And they are carried out, with inexorable logic, into all their most revolting results.
Such is a concise, but, as we believe, a correct outline of the leading principles of the system of Spinoza.

We shall now offer a few remarks upon it, directed to the object of showing wherein consists the radical fallacy on which it rests, and what are the considerations by which thoughtful men may be most effectually secured against its pernicious influence.
It has been well said by Professor Saisset, that the fallacy of this system does not lie in any one proposition of the series, but that it is a vicious circle throughout; that the paralogism is not in this or that part of the "Ethics,"-- it is everywhere; and that the germ of the whole is contained in the _definitions_, which are assumed, but not proved.[123] Our attention, therefore, must be given, in the first instance, to the fundamental assumptions on which the whole superstructure is built.
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