However...

However, he emphatically denied that God was a person or acte for a purpose; that anything could be good or evil from the divine perspective; or that there was a personal immortality involving memory (Audi 2001, p. 874). According to Spinoza, except for God, no substance could be or be conceived. It followed from an analysis of the concept of substance that whatever was not it; it must be a modification of a substance thereof.

Spinoza concluded that, whatever was, was in God, and nothing could be or be conceived without God’. Together these views expressed Spinoza’s substance-monism, which could be defined as a complex thesis that there was only one substance in the universe; that this substance is to be identified with God; and that all things, were a modification of this one substance; in some sense it was an extension of God (Allison 1998). According to Spinoza a substance was not merely infinite among its own kind.

That is, it became ‘absolutely infinite’ ultimately through any other thing of the same kind. For Spinoza, that which was all-inclusive or possessing all-reality was meant to have infinite attributes. The more reality or essence of being a thing had, the more attributes belonged to it. A being that possessed all reality, that is - God - could be described as possessing infinite attributes. God alone was the substance that possessed all the attributes, which existed.

Therefore, there were none left for any other conceivable substance. Combining this with the proposition that two substances could not share an attribute, it followed that there could be no substance apart from God (ibid). In fact, identification of God with nature immediately led to a distinction between two aspects of nature: active or generating nature and passive or generated nature. The former referred to God as bring conceived through Himself, that is, substance with infinite attributes.

The latter referred to a modal system conceived through these attributes (which included, but was not identical to a total of particular things). Consequently, the task was to explain the connection between these two aspects of nature - a task that would be the Spinozistic analogue to the traditional problem of explaining the relationship between God and creation (ibid). According to Spinoza, God was infinite being.

God was infinite substance, consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expressed God’s eternal and infinite essence (I, prop. XI).