 The path to restraining and moderating the affects is through virtue. Spinoza is a psychological and ethical egoist. All beings naturally seek their own advantage—to preserve their own being and increase their power—and it is right for them do so. This is what virtue consists in. Since we are thinking beings, endowed with intelligence and reason, what is to our greatest advantage is knowledge. Our virtue, therefore, consists in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, of adequate ideas. The best kind of knowledge is a purely intellectual intuition of the essences of things. This “third kind of knowledge”—beyond both random experience and ratiocination—sees things not in their temporal dimension, not in their durational existence and in relation to other particular things, but under the aspect of eternity (sub specie aeternitatis), that is, abstracted from all considerations of time and place and situated in their relationship to God and its attributes. They are apprehended, that is, in their conceptual and causal relationship to the universal essences (thought and extension) and the eternal laws of nature.