If you believe in free will then you hold that one can be held responsible for acts, good or bad, which are freely done, and so rightly praised or blamed, punished or rewarded. Still, this guess or hypothesis does not explain the connection between final causes and order and confusion, bea uty and ugliness very well. Nor does it tell us what the connection between free will and final causes is. So, we want to see if there is a connection between free will and final causes, and we may expect that there is something else going on in additio n which will explain the other pairs of terms. Spinoza may have got this idea from reading Hobbes.
Men act always on account of an end, namely on account of their own advantage, which they want.
Hence, they consider all natural things as means to their advantage. Hence they consider all natural things as means to their advantage. And if it was made for that purpose , it did not make itself but rather was made by a ruler of Nature, endowed with human freedom, who had taken care of all things for men, and makes all things for their use. Hence they hold that the gods made all things for man in order to bind men to them and be held in the highest honor. So each tried different ways to get God to love him above the rest, and to direct the whole of nature according to their blind desire and insatiable greed.