Abstract

A specter haunts the Tractatus de intellectus emendatione: eternity. It is a specter, for it never appears there in person, except at the end, in the genitive, that is to say, to determine another word – species. The search for eternal joy does not involve asceticism or contempt for what ascetics call the goods of this world. Eternity has therefore finally found its definition – and this definition links it closely to divine existence. Eternity plays a major and very complex role. Eternity has therefore become a general characteristic of being and no longer the characteristic reserved for God. Where Spinoza is true to his own thought, and far from Descartes, he is so precisely with the instruments borrowed from Descartes, but completely transformed: the distinction between essence and existence, and the thesis of continued creation.