 For Susman, Spinoza represents the “type of the pure metaphysician” (1913: 53) whose philosophical approach reflects the basic disposition of Jewish tradition in metaphysically refined terms. As she reconstructs Spinoza’s central metaphysical argument, she argues that we can only get to the heart of Spinoza’s thought if we recognize the deeper religious disposition vis-à-vis the world (Weltgefühl) that guides his metaphysics (1913: 57). It is precisely this deeper reaching disposition that informs Spinoza’s thought and allows it to move beyond a merely rationalist outlook. In Spinoza, the metaphysical God gives way to the religious God at precisely the point where the nexus of the world extends beyond the human mind. At this point for the first time the world is truly connected to the human being and their action. While the purely logical nexus of the world does not allow for the transition to the living human soul, this transition becomes possible for Spinoza because of the particular way he conceives of immanence as the dynamics of God’s internal force of infinite self-love. This turn of the divine world against itself eventually becomes active affect (1913: 58). This point of the turning of the world against itself, Susman notes, is what we call self-consciousness, which in turn coincides with God’s consciousness. The soul and its form of adequate knowledge rest on God’s self-affection extending to the dynamics of the increasing, active affect that leads to the blissful joy that relates solely to God and his law. This holy joy Spinoza calls the intellectual love of God (1913: 59).