What is natura naturans and natura naturata?

Baruch Spinoza, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Baruch Spinoza answers

Natura naturans and natura naturata — nature viewed as active and nature viewed as passive — are not two separate things, but two ways of conceiving the single infinite substance that is God or Nature. By natura naturans I understand that which is in itself and conceived through itself: the attributes of substance, which express eternal and infinite essence — God, in so far as he is considered as a free cause.1

This is substance considered from the side of its own productive power, the ground from which everything follows necessarily. God acts solely by the laws of his own nature and is not constrained by anyone, and it is precisely this unconstrained self-determination that natura naturans names.2 From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways — everything which can fall within the sphere of an infinite intellect.3

That infinite productive necessity is what I call nature active, nature as cause. By natura naturata I understand all that which follows from the necessity of God's nature, or of any of God's attributes — that is, all the modes of the attributes of God, in so far as they are considered as things which are in God, and which without God cannot exist or be conceived.4

The finite things of the world, the particular modifications of substance, belong here. And notice what this entails: nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.5 The modes that constitute natura naturata are not free-floating; they follow from natura naturans with the same necessity that properties follow from a geometrical definition.

The distinction is therefore not a division of substance into two halves. Substance is one — that which is in itself and conceived through itself — and mode is that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself. Natura naturans is substance and its attributes considered as the source of all determination; natura naturata is the same reality considered as the totality of what is determined.67

All things which are, are in God, and so depend on God that without him they can neither be nor be conceived.8 The two Latin phrases are two perspectives on one and the same infinite whole.

Sources

  1. by nature viewed as active we should understand that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself, or those attributes of substance, which express eternal and infinite essence, in other words God, in so far as he is considered as a free cause.
    Ethics
  2. God acts solely by the laws of his own nature, and is not constrained by anyone.
    Ethics
  3. From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways--that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect.
    Ethics
  4. By nature viewed as passive I understand all that which follows from the necessity of the nature of God, or of any of the attributes of God, that is, all the modes of the attributes of God, in so far as they are considered as things which are in God, and which without God cannot exist or be conceived.
    Ethics
  5. Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.
    Ethics
  6. By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.
    Ethics
  7. By mode, I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
    Ethics
  8. all things which are, are in God, and so depend on God, that without him they can neither be nor be conceived.
    Ethics