struggling with the world 159sense of our capacity to resist and to remake the social and conceptual
settings of our actions.Th e doctrine of the one regime vindicated and reinterpreted. Spinoza
was right: there can be only one regime in the world. Th ere is no king-
dom within a kingdom. Th e doctrine of the one regime requires no
special defense; it follows the failed attempt to recast the diff erences
between our ways of engaging the parts of reality that pertain directly
to us and those that do not as a division of reality itself. It represents the
position at which we arrive when we reject the anthropocentrism of the
idea of the two regimes and recognize, without qualifi cation, that the
world exists apart from us. We are not entitled to convert either an-
thropology or epistemology into ontology. From the limitations or the
variations of our understanding and our agency, with regard to diff er-
ent parts of our experience, there results nothing with regard to the
or ga ni za tion of the larger world beyond us and within us.
It is true that we engage reality from our point of view, with our lim-
ited perceptual and cognitive apparatus, evolved and embodied in dy-
ing organisms. But how far this apparatus circumscribes the reach of
our insight, or commits us to a set of categories from which we are un-
able to escape, is not something that we can defi nitively determine be-
forehand. As the example of causation shows, what at one time may
seem to be embedded in the inescapable structure of our mental life
may at another appear to us as a preconception from which, with the
help of science and imagination, we can free ourselves.
Th e content of the doctrine of the one regime is not self- evident.
Th ere is one regime, but it is not the one that Spinoza described. His
account of the one regime is, in some respects, a variant of the project
of classical ontology: a world of timeless substances. It is, in other re-
spects, a panentheism if not a pantheism: God is the world itself, or the
world as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. In this panen-
theism, the spatial meta phor prevails over the temporal one: the eternal
world has no future; it has only an eternal present. In such a one re-
gime, placed under the dominion of a timeless and universal necessity,
there is no room for the new.
Th e history of philosophy and of theology presents us with examples
of the conception of one regime associated with the ac cep tance of