spinosity

[Eng. spinos(e); -ity.] 1. Lit .: The quality or state of being spinous or thorny. *2. Fig .: Something thorny, harsh, or crabbed. "He [Jeremy Taylor) could bear with the harshne and roughne of the schools, and was not unseen in their subtilties and spinosities." -Wood: Athena Oxon., vol. ii. spi-nō-so-, pref . [Lat. spinosus .] Spinous. spinoso-dentate, a. Bot.: Having teeth tipped with spines. spin-oŭs, adject. [Latin spinosus, from spina = a thorn, a spine.) 1. Lit. & Bot.: Full of spines; armed with spines or thorns; thorny. most rigid Monotheism, according as his cardinal teaching-that there is only One Substance, Godhas been interpreted. By Substance, however, Spinoza meant the underlying reality and ever-living existence, and he chose for the epigraph of his Ethics the words of St. Paul: "In Him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts xvii. 28). God is for him the one principle, having Thought and Extension as two eternal and infinite attributes constituting its e ence, of which attributes Mind and Matter are the nece ary manifestations; and and thus he solves the problem of the relation of the Finite to the Infinite. Everything is a form of of the ever-living existence, the Substance, God, which is, and is not, Nature, with which He is no rivulet or eternity with time. God is natura naturans, Nature is natura naturata ; the one is to be confounded than the fountain with the the energy, the other is the act. In the same way he explains the union of the soul with the body. Man is but a mode of the Divine Existence; his mind a spark of the Divine Flame, his body a mode of the Infinite existence. IMG:content-0042.png:[blocks in formation] *1. A woman who spins or whose occupation is to spin; a spinner. "The spinster's distaff stood unemployed."- Idler, No. 2. It was formerly applied also to a male spinner, as in Shakesp.: Henry VIII., i. 2. *2. A woman of evil life or character; so called from their being obliged to spin in the House of Correction as a punishment. [SPINNING-HOUSE.] "Many would never be wretched spinsters were they spinsters in deed, nor come to so public and shameful Fuller : Worthies of England; Kent. 2. Fig .: Thorny, crabbed, sharp. "Nor needeth it any spinous criticism for its explica punishments if painfully employed in that vocation." tion."-Mede: Works, disc. 4.