THIS INTELLECTUAL LIFE POSSESSES THE REASONS OR IDEAS.
Thus intellectual Life, which is the perfect actualization, embraces all the things that our mind now conceives, and all intellectual operations. In its potentiality it contains all things as essences, in the same manner as Intelligence does. Now Intelligence possesses them by thought, a thought which is not discursive (but intuitive). The intellectual life therefore possesses all the things of which there are "reasons" (that is, ideas); itself is a single Reason, great, perfect, which contains all reasons,[327] which examines them in an orderly fashion, beginning with the first, or rather, which has ever examined them, so that one could never really tell that it was examining them.[328] For all things that we grasp by ratiocination, in whatever part soever of the universe they may be located, are found as intuitively possessed by Intelligence. It would seem as if it was Essence itself which, (being identical with Intelligence), had made Intelligence reason thus (by producing its conceptions),[329] as appears to happen in the ("seminal) reasons" which produce the animals.[330] In the (ideas, that is in the "seminal) reasons" which are anterior to ratiocination, all things are found to possess a constitution such that the most penetrating intelligence would have considered best, by reasoning.[331] We should therefore expect (great and wonderful things) of these Ideas, superior and anterior to Nature and ("seminal) reasons." There Intelligence fuses with "Being;"[329] neither in essence nor intelligence is there anything adventitious. There everything is smoothly perfect, since everything there is conformable to intelligence. All Essence is what Intelligence demands; it is consequently veritable primary Essence; for if it proceeded from some other (source), this also would be Intelligence.