Nature, Thought, Mathematics

Both Empiricists and Kant argue that Mathematical relations are part of the perception of Nature, not in Nature itself.  Thus, if Spinoza's attribution of Thought to Nature is based on the thesis, perhaps derived from Descartes, as has been previously discussed, that it has an inherent Mathematical structure, then it is vulnerable to formidable challenge.  However, the stronger textual evidence suggests that for Spinoza, it is the "order" of events in Nature that evinces the inherence of Thought.  Indeed, Hume might be skeptical about the positing of a law that connects the striking of a ball by a stick with the subsequent movement of the ball.  But he does not deny that in the concrete case, one precedes the other.  So, it is most likely that Spinoza's attribution of Thought to Nature is based on the Ordinality of events, which obtains even in the case of a mechanistic sequence, i. e. the order of events in Newton's clockwork Nature expresses the Thought its divine clockmaker.  Furthermore, if Mathematics is defined in terms of terms of Ordinal Numbers, rather than Cardinal Numbers, the inherent Ordinality of events entails the possibility of an inherent Mathematical structure.  So, the Empiricist potential  criticism of the the attribution of Thought to Nature is, at best, only conditionally sound.