Modern Pantheistic Fatalism Spinoza's pantheistic necessarianism is, however, perhaps the frankest and most rigid form of fatalism advocated by any leading modern philosopher. Starting from the idea of substance, which he so defines that there can be but one, he deduces in geometrical fashion all forms of being in the universe from this notion. This substance must be infinite. It evolves necessarily through an infinite number of attributes into an infinity of modes. The seemingly individual and independent beings of the world, minds and bodies, are merely these modes of the infinite substance.
Nothing is possible except what actually is.
There is free will in neither God nor man. Human volitions and decisions flow with the same inexorable necessity from man's nature as geometrical properties from the concept of a triangle. Spinoza's critics were quick to point out that in this view man is no longer responsible if he commits a crime nor deserving of praise in recompense for his good deeds, and that God is the author of sin. Spinoza's only answer was that rewards and punishments still have their use as motives, that evil is merely limitation and therefore not real, and that whatever is real is good. Vice, however, he holds, is as objectionable as pain or physical corruption.