Spinoza's Parallelism

Spinoza's 'Parallelism' is a common reference to his proposition that 'the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things'. Seemingly under-appreciated is that the proposition most immediately challenges the Teleological concept of Nature, in which the order of ideas is the inverse of the order of things--in the Teleological order of ideas, the End is prior to the Means, but in the order of things, the Means, i. e. the Efficient Cause, is prior to the End, i. e. the effect of that Cause. Now, Hume's theory of Causality is often taken as a refutation of Spinoza's Parallelism. The main thread of his argument is that Spinoza confuses three distinct structures--the analytical relation of a priori ideas, the synthetic relation of a posteriori ideas, and the relation between events--and that causal knowledge is the second type, with no correspondence to either the first or the third. An easy response for Spinoza is that the absence of the correspondence between the second and the other two only confirms the inadequacy of that kind of knowledge, and of its irrelevance to Parallelism, which pertains only to the relation between the those other two structures. That response also applies to interpretations of the course of events by not only common sense, but by theories of History as well, including Hegel's, i. e. that they are all inadequate constructions. A stronger objection to Parallelism can come from Pragmatism--since only God can verify it, there is no human way to either confirm or disprove it, so, hence, the proposition is meaningless. However, a Kantian might defend it as a useful 'Regulative' idea, i. e. as a potentially fruitful guide to any construction of a sequence of events, of both mundane and of historical scope.