Method and Comprehension

In Improvement of the Understanding, Spinoza characterizes an Idea as a "tool", and likens the propensity of Mind to construct more complex Ideas from simpler ones to the construction of more complex tools from simpler ones.  But the passage is no mere observation of a propensity of Mind--it proposes a Method. The work, probably inspired by Descartes, is Spinoza's Discourse on Method, in preparation for the Ethics, and its "Geometric" Method.  Like Descartes, Spinoza does not examine the concept of Method per se, thereby leaving it ungrounded, i. e. the Idea of the Method of constructing more complex Ideas out of simpler ones is not one of those Ideas.  Likewise, therefore, insofar as the Ethics consists in the execution of a Method, the Method is independent of all its constituent Ideas, including God/Nature/Substance, the Intuition of God/Nature/Substance, and the principle of the endeavor to persist in being.  Now, the Idea of the construction of more complex Ideas out of simpler ones comprehends the entire sequence of such constructions.  Hence, that Idea is a product of Comprehension.  Thus, likewise, the Idea of the Ethics as a whole is one of Comprehension.  But then Comprehension spans the three types of Knowledge that are developed within the work--Opinion, Reason, and Intuition.  Thus, implicitly expressed by the Ethics is a fourth kind of Knowledge--Comprehension, which spans not only the Ideas of the other three, but Ideas of the relations between them, as well.  Now, since that Idea includes that of Opinion, and Opinion, as inadequate, is not in divine Thought, the object of Comprehension cannot be God/Nature/Substance, so must be of a whole that exceeds that Idea.