Fascinating TLS signed “Lots of love, Phil,” who adds two hearts with arrows, three pages, 8.5 x 11, January 13, 1981. Lengthy letter to science fiction author Patricia Warrick, in part: "After talking to you I looked up Spinoza in my Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and that I had…hit on the precise element that makes Spinoza's system what it is: there are an infinite number of attributes to the one substance (Spinoza is a monist) but we apprehend only two: extension in space (what I call 'soma' or 'body' or 'brain' or 'the spatiotemporal world') and thought (what I call 'Nous' or 'mind'). As I correctly said, 'Neither can be reduced to the other.' Equally correct was my monistic perception: 'I witnessed the two attributes…of God combined: body and mind; I saw them fused, i.e. monistically.' This lies at the very heart of Spinoza's system, which is stated as: 'Deus sive natura.' I.e. 'God which is to say nature' (this is how this reference book gives it, but actually Spinoza said: 'Substantia sive Deus sive natura.' Which is to say: 'Substance which is God which is nature,' meaning that there is one substance and one alone; that substance is God and that God is nature)…
Since we normally experience the world as material and physical it was the other attribute of it—thought—that so staggered me in February 1974. This was the attribute we do not normally see when we apprehend world, yet I a priori understood that the world that I was seeing was as much mind as it was matter, as much thought as it was extension in space…Where the error comes in (and it certainly came into my thinking, my exegesis) is when you try to reduce one attribute to the other; I kept saying, 'Thought is really physical' or the physical is really thought,' but it is the heart of Spinoza's monism that neither can be reduced to the other; they are two attributes of one substance. Other attributes may exist (he says) but we don't know of them." In fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope.
In an interview with Frank C. Bertrand in January 1980, Dick affirms his adulation for Spinoza's monist system: ‘Gradually my interest in philosophy passed over into an interest in theology. Like the early Greeks I am a believer in panpsychism. Of all the metaphysical systems in philosophy I feel the greatest affinity for that of Spinoza, with his dictum, ‘Deus sive substantia sive natura;’ to me this sums up everything (Viz: “God i.e reality i.e. nature’).' These concepts formed the basis of his 1981 sci-fi novel VALIS.
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