  Spinoza’s naturalism excludes the possibility of a transcendent God. Those who believe in a transcendent God “imagine that there are two powers, distinct from each other, the power of God and the power of natural things…. they imagine the power of God to be like the authority of royal majesty, and the power of nature to be like a force and impetus” (TTP 6/81). Of course, on Spinoza’s account, God is not a transcendent legislator, God is nature itself. Consequently, all accounts of right that are rooted in God’s legislating will are specious. This is a direct rebuke not only of defenders of the divine right of kings, but also of most accounts of natural rights as entitlements that were embraced by many seventeenth-century theorists.