Will, Comprehension, Parallelism

Some events seem to exemplify Spinoza's 'parallelism' thesis that ' the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things', e. g. the process of drawing a circle in accordance with the definition of a 'circle' as 'the figure described by any line whereof one end is fixed and the other is free'. However, other events seem to fail to exemplify the thesis, e. g. the sequence of events that transpires while the ideas 'praying to god' and 'it is raining' are successively occurring. Spinoza's accommodation of the latter possibility involves qualifying the thesis as applying to only adequate ideas, but another approach is to treat both the proposed rule and its apparent exception as special cases of how the two orders can be related. For example, here, Will and Comprehension, the two principles of Experience, can combine in an infinite variety of ways--often with either preceding the other, but, occasionally, they occur simultaneously, therein achieving what can also be characterized as 'parallel' ordering. Similarly, what Spinoza considers to be a necessary archetype may be only a contingent, albeit important, special case.