METAPHYSICS given his identiWcation of causation with entailment Just as a proposition entails itself, God is His own cause and He is the immanent, not the transient, cause of all things This system is extremely diYcult to understand, and may well be ultimately incomprehensible It is more proWtable to follow another line of thought which Spinoza oVers in order to explain the structure of the universe Our bodies, he remarks, are composed of many diVerent parts, varying in kind from each other; the parts may change and vary, and yet each individual retains its nature and identity ‘We may easily proceed thus to inWnity, and conceive the whole of nature as one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in inWnite ways, without any change in the individual as a whole’ (Eth, 43) This invites us to see the relationship between Wnite beings and God not in terms of eVect and cause but in terms of part and whole We often talk of parts of our body as performing actions and undergoing changes—but it is not too diYcult to see that this is an improper way of talking It is not my eyes which see, or my liver which puriWes my blood My eyes and liver not have a life of their own, and such activities are activities of my whole organism Philosophers from Aristotle onwards have pointed out that it is more correct to say that I see with my eyes and that my body uses my liver to purify my blood If we follow Spinoza’s hint we will see that he is inviting us to see nature as a single organic whole, of which each of us is a particle and an instrument This vision of nature as a single whole, a uniWed system containing within itself the explanation of all of itself, is found attractive by many people Many, too, are willing to follow Spinoza in concluding that if the universe contains its own explanation, then everything that happens is determined, and there is no possibility of any sequence of events other than the actual one ‘In nature,’ Spinoza says, ‘there is nothing contingent; everything is determined, by the necessity of the divine nature, to exist and operate in a certain manner’ (Eth, 20) Making Room for Contingency Of all Spinoza’s contemporaries, the philosopher closest to him was Malebranche Like Spinoza, Malebranche thought that the connection between a 193