They have always been and
always will be. The enunciation of the thirty-third proposition is,
"The intellectual love of God which arises from the third kind of
knowledge is eternal." The "third kind of knowledge" is that intuitive
science which "advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of
certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of
things; {54} "No love except intellectual love is eternal," {55a} and
the scholium to this proposition adds, "If we look at the common opinion
of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of
their minds, but they confound it with duration, and attribute it to
imagination or memory, which they believe remain after death." The
intellectual love of the mind towards God is the very "love with which
He loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He
can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered
under the form of eternity; that is to say, the intellectual love of the
mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves
Himself.
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