 We saw earlier that there are grounds, though hardly conclusive, for supposing that Spinoza held a fundamental metaphysical view of physical nature that is akin to the contemporary view of the physical world as composed of fields of force, with bodies in some sense being constituted by relatively stable patterns, relative to our own, of force. However, Spinoza's hostility to observation as a source of knowledge, his view that experimentation can at best provide examples of what we know through reason, and his rejection of the idea that physical nature is to be known through number and measurable quantities, suggest that his convergence with contemporary physical science goes no farther than this possible anticipation of the theory of fields as fundamental.