P68: If men were born free, they would form no concept of good and evil so long as they remained free.

Dem.: I call him free who is led by reason alone. Therefore, he who is born free, and remains free, has only adequate ideas, and so has no concept of evil (by P64 C). And since good and evil are correlates, he also has no concept of good, q.e.d.

Schol.: It is evident from P4 that the hypothesis of this proposition is false, and cannot be conceived unless we attend only to human nature, or rather to God/Nature, not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar only as he is the cause of man’s existence.

This, and the other things I have now demonstrated seem to have been indicated by Moses in that story of the first man. For in it the only power of God/Nature conceived is that by which he created man, i.e., the power by which he consulted only man’s advantage. And so we are told that God/Nature prohibited a free man from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that as soon as he ate of it, he immediately feared death, rather than desiring to live; and then, that, the man having found a wife who agreed completely with his nature, he knew that there could be nothing in nature more useful to him than she was; but that after he believed the lower animals to be like himself, he immediately began to imitate their affects (see IIIP27) and to lose his freedom; and that afterwards this freedom was recovered by the Patriarchs, guided by the Spirit of Christ, i.e., by the idea of God/Nature, on which alone it depends that man should be free, and desire for other men the good he desires for himself (as we have demonstrated above, by P37).