Spinoza

________________________________________________
Title:     Spinoza
Author: James Anthony Froude [More Titles by Froude]

Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate Lineamenta Alque Annotationes ad Traclatum Theologico Politicum. Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halae ad Salam. J. F. Lippert. 1852.

This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will much illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better part of his life in working the language in which he expressed it clear of ambiguities; and such earlier draughts of his system as are supposed still to be extant in MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it; but because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world; refusing pensions, legacies, money in many forms, he maintained himself with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza of "blessed memory."

The account which remains of him we owe not to an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman, to whom his theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his character,--that except so far as his opinions were blameable, he had lived to all outward appearances free from fault. We desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision with even popular prejudices, and still more with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business is to relate what he was, and leave others to form their own conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of such a man,--a lesson deeper than any which is to be found in his philosophy,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant as to forfeit those graces which are promised not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful language,--"justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum verae fidei Catholicae signurn est, et veri Spiritus sancti fructus: et ubicumque haec reperiuntur, ibi Christus re verg est, et ubicumque haec desunt deest Christus. Solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiae et caritatis." We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men. We will say, indeed, as much as this, that wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either that the points of disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance, or that there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant under difference of words, or else that the real truth is something different from what is held by any of the disputants, and that each is representing some important element which the other ignores or forgets. In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success. Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside, and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effects upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with his disciples, in the author of this system there was no unwillingness to look closely at it, or follow it out to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to Spinoza, at least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself thoroughly understood--a merit in which it cannot be said that his followers have imitated him--Pantheism, as it is known in England, being a very synonym of vagueness and mysticism.

The fact is, that both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist --which is still more extravagant; and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a Colt trunkner Mann--a God intoxicated man; an expression which has been quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as attempted? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort after sublime emotions. A plain, practical person, his object in philosophy was only to find a rule on which he could depend to govern his own actions and his own judgment: and his treatises contain no more than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, and the grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, "De Emendatione Intellectas." His language is very beautiful, but elaborate and full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to epitomize it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was his place and business in it, he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found little that he could venture to imitate. Whatever they professed, they all really guided themselves by their different notions of what they thought desirable; and these notions themselves resting on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience, the experience of one not being the experience of another, men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arising, as it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge, things which at one time looked desirable disappointing expectation when obtained, and the wiser course concealing itself often under an uninviting exterior, he desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and endeavour to find, by some surer method, where the real good of man lay. All this may sound very Pagan, and perhaps it is so. We must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as the interpreter of it. Some true account of things, however, he thought it likely that there must be, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms of human thought, but one, he reflected, would admit of the certainty which he required--the mathematical; and, therefore, if certain knowledge were attainable at all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which were formally involved in them. The question was, therefore, of these ideas, these verae ideae, as he calls them,--what were they, and how were they to be obtained: if they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must, he felt, be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious and Platonic.

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, he says, we require others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one, and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with the mind, and there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover them, he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything, and he finds that these senses resolve themselves into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four:-- We know a thing,

1.
i. Ex mero auditu: because we have heard it from some
person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to question.

ii. Ab experientia vaga: from general experience: for instance,
all facts or phenomena which come to us through our senses as
phenomena, but of the causes of which we are ignorant.

2. These two in Ethics are classed together.

As we have correctly conceived the laws of such
phenomena, and see them following in their sequence
m the order of nature.

3. Ex scientia intuitiva: which alone is absolutely clear
and certain.

To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not understand it.

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.

A fourth with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by simple intuitive force that 1:2 = 3:6.

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very simplest truths non nisi simplicissimae veritates can be perceived, but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after science; and the true ideas, the verae ideae, which are apprehended by this faculty of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has none to give us. "Veritas," he says to his friends, in answer to their question, "veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit." These original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are contradictions in terms:--"Ut sciam me scire necessario debeo prius scire. Hinc pater quod certitudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam objectivam. ...Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne tollatur dubium; hint sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum veritatis quaerere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est via, et ipsa vetitas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia illa idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur." (De Emend. Intell.)

The opinion of this Review on reasonings of such a kind has been too often expressed to require us now to say how insecure they appear to us. When we remember the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less pretending canon promises a safer road. Ho pasi dokei, "what all men think," says Aristotle, touto einai phamen, "this we say is,"--"and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better." We are to see, however, what these idete are which Spinoza offers as self-evident. All will turn upon that; for, of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his canon, when his friends, every one of them, so floundered and stumbled among what he regarded as his simplest propositions, requiring endless signa veritalis, and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to "recognize them as elementary certainties." Modern readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of the first book of the "Ethica," and they may judge for themselves:--

DEFINITIONS.

1. By a thing which is causa sui, its own cause, I mean a thing the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which cannot be conceived of except as existing.

2. I call a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be circumscribed by another (or others) of the same nature, e.g. a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body larger than it; but body is not circumscribed by thought, nor thought by body.

3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived of by itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the conception of anything else as the cause of it.

4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance as constituting the essence of substance.

5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in something else, by and through which it is conceived.

6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence.

EXPLANATION.

I say absolutely infinite, not infinite suo genere, for of what is infinite sua genere only, the attributes are not infinite but finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own essence everything by which substance can be expressed and which involves no impossibility.

7. That thing is "free" which exists by the sole necessity of its own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That is "not free" which is called into existence by something else, and is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite method.

8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessarily and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal.

EXPLANATION.

Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity, and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the duration be without beginning or end.

So far the definitions; then follow the

AXIOMS.

1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue of something else.

2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of something else, we must conceive through and in itself.

3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if there be no given cause no effect can follow.

4. Things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be understood through one another; i.e. the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.

5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the cause of it.

6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its ideate.

7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as non-existent does not involve existence.

Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with which to start upon our enterprise of learning, the larger number of which, so far from being simple, must be absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction, and which become only intelligible propositions as we look back upon them after having become acquainted with the system which they are supposed to contain.

Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such unlooked-for difficulties, the important question, after all, is not of their obscurity but of their truth. Many things in all the sciences are obscure to an unpractised understanding, which are true enough and clear enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and may be fairly laid as foundations of a scientific system, although rudimentary students must be contented to accept them upon faith. Of course it is entirely competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply only to the ideas so defined, and not to any supposed object existing which corresponds with them. Euclid defines his triangles and circles, and discovers that to figures so described certain properties previously unknown may be proved to belong; but as in nature there are no such things as triangles and circles exactly answering the definition, his conclusions, as applied to actually existing objects, are either not true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be possible to bridge over the gulf between existing things and the abstract conception of them, as Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal road to certainty if it be a practicable one, but we cannot say that we ever met any one who could say honestly Spinoza had convinced him; and power of demonstration, like all other powers, can be judged only by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction? If not, it is nothing. We need not detain our readers among these abstractions. The real power of Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary appreciation, or we should long ago have heard the last of it. Like all other systems which have attracted followers, it addresses itself not to the logical intellect but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside. We refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which it thrusts itself upon our reception, but regarding it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the nature of the world, of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these things we know that there must be, and the curiosity which asks the question regards itself, of course, as competent in some degree to judge of the answer to it. Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy in the aspect in which it is really powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy of the method.

The system is evolved in a series of theorems in severely demonstrative order out of the definitions and axioms which we have translated. To propositions 1--6 we have nothing to object; they will not, probably, convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and seem to follow (as far as we can speak of "following," in such subjects), by fair reasoning. "Substance is prior in nature to its affections." "Substances with different attributes have nothing in common," and therefore "one cannot be the cause of the other." "Things really distinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute or mode (there being nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and therefore, because things modally distinguished do not qua substance differ from one another, there cannot be more than one substance of the same attribute; and therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among what Spinoza calls notiones simplicissimas), since there cannot be two substances of the same attribute and substances of different attributes cannot be the cause one of the other, it follows that no substances can be produced by another substance."

The existence of substance, he then concludes, is involved in the nature of the thing itself. Substance exists. It does and must. We ask, why? and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it, and therefore it is self-caused; i.e. by the first definition the essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If it cannot be produced and exists, then, of course, it exists in virtue of its own nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion, the proof falls to pieces, unless we fall back on the facts of experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves, are a real substantial something. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, he winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say exists? Things--essences-- existences; these are but the vague names with which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena, disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend rested upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas of a fictitious resting-place.

"If any one affirms," says Spinoza, "that he has a clear, distinct--that is to say, a true idea of substance, but that nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is the same as if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet was uncertain whether it was not false. Or if he says that substance can be created, it is like saying that a false idea can become a true idea--as absurd a thing as it is possible to conceive; and therefore the existence of substance, as well as the essence of it, must be acknowledged as an eternal verity."

It is again the same story. He speaks of a clear idea of substance; but he has not proved that such an idea is within the compass of the mind. A man's own notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he really sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in itself is no evidence that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as an existing thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists. It is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of this or that fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot recognize the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.

From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of God. After a few more propositions following one another with the same kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusions that there is but one substance, that this substance being necessarily existent, it is also infinite, and that it is therefore identical with the Being who had been previously defined as the "Ens absolute perfectum," consisting of infinite "attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence." Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clerke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The inconclusiveness of their reasoning may perhaps be observed most readily in the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the same method, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important, however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very key-stone of the Pantheistic system. As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:--God is an all-perfect Being,--perfection is the idea which we form of him: existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism we are told is only apparent; existence is part of the idea; it is as much involved in it, as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle, and a non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle. It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything, --Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But in this objection there is really nothing of weight; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as perfection and existence we know too little to speculate in this way. Existence may be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the matter. Such arguments are but endless petilianes principii, like the self-devouring serpent resolving themselves into nothing. We wander round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off ineffectual.

The idea, however, lying at the bottom of the conviction, which obviously Spinoza felt upon the matter, is stated with sufficient distinctness in one of his letters. "Nothing is more clear," he writes to his pupil De Vries, "than that, on the one hand, everything which exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be assigned to it;" "and conversely," (and this he calls his argumentum palmarium in proof of the existence of God,) "the more attributes I assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing." Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist (as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told, in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is solely from the confused habits of our own minds.

It may seem to some persons that all arguments are good when on the right side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive. As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea attached by Spinoza to the word perfection, and if we commit ourselves to this logic, it may lead us out to some unexpected consequences. Obviously all such reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the nature of things external to ourselves as they really are in their absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and therefore we cannot say what they are not; whatever we receive intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked proposition, it must involve necessarily a petitio principii. We have a right, however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the control of a "power" which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and the perfections which we attribute to Him are those moral perfections which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he tells us, is but to see in Him a reflection of themselves: as if a triangle were to conceive of Him as eminenter triangularis, or a circle to give Him the property of circularity.

Having arrived, however, at existence, we soon find ourselves among ideas, which at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except substance, the attributes under which substance is ex expressed, and the modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance; and, therefore, there is no such thing as creation, and everything which exists, is either an attribute of Him, or an affection of some attribute of Him, modified in this manner or in that. Beyond Him there is nothing, and nothing like Him or equal to Him; He therefore alone in Himself is absolutely free, uninfiuenced by anything, for nothing is except Himself; and from Him and from His supreme power, essence, intelligence (for all these words mean the same thing) all things have necessarily flowed, and will and must flow on for ever, in the same manner as from the nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence; and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents upon it, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of God.

Each attribute is infinite suo genere; and it is time that we should know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God two only are known to us--"extension," and "thought," or "mind." Duration, even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is not even a real thing. It has no relation to being conceived mathematically, in the same way as it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, sub quadam specie aeternitatis. But extension, or substance extended, and thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We must not confound extension with body, for though body be a mode of extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself---or, in other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these attributes are produced from God, and in Him they have their being, and without Him they would cease to be.

Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration in this strange logic, (and most admirably indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it,) we learn that God is the only causa libera; that no other thing or being has any power of self-determination: all move by fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent (see Tractat. Theol. Polit. cap. iv. sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the causa immanens omnium; He is not a personal being existing apart from the universe; but Himself in His own reality, He is expressed in the universe, which is His living garment. Keeping to the philosophical language of the term, Spinoza preserves the distinction between natura nalurans and natura naturala. The first is being in itself, the attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the properties of these attributes. And thus all which is, is what it is by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God is free, because no causes external to Himself have power over Him; and as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no infringement on God's freedom to say that He must have acted as He has acted, but rather He is absolutely free because absolutely a law Himself to Himself.

Here ends the first book of the Ethics, the book which contains, as we said, the nolianes simplicissimas, and the primary and rudimental deductions from them. his Dei naturam, Spinoza says in his lofty confidence, ejusque proprietates explicui. But as if conscious that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologize, but to show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors, lies in our notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret God's action through our own; we speak of His intentions, as if he were a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their advantage good, and whatever obstructs it evil. For our convenience we form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which to strive, and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be wicked. But such generic abstractions are but entia imaginationis, and have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the means of being. There is no rebellion against Him, and no resistance of His will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent; what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals, and as soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to the former a power of free volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.

"If I am asked," concludes Spinoza, "why then all mankind were not created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was because, I reply, there was to Him no lack of matter to create all things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of His nature were ample enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be conceived by an Infinite Intelligence."

It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn away with no disposition to learn more philosophy which issues in such conclusions; and resentful perhaps that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must claim however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think ourselves would be the moral effect of it if it were generally received, in his hands and in his heart it is worked into maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist; the fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, if our conscience did not forbid us to listen to it. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg; and it will be seen from this with how little justice the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions between virtue and vice.

"We speak," writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged something of the kind, "we speak of this or that man having done a wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such abstract manner, nor forms to himself such kind of generic definitions, and since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's."

"If this be so," then replies Blyenburg, "bad men fulfil God's will as well as good."

"It is true," Spinoza answers, "they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings) his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the artificer, --they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their service."

Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme doctrine of Grace: and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to "clay in the hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to dishonour," may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion. If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert that God has predetermined it,--to tell us that he has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher sacrilegious who has but systematized the faith which so many believe, and cleared it of its most hideous features.

At all events, Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from himself or from his readers. We believe that logic has no business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the conscience and not in the intellect,--that it is practical merely, and not speculative. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him with instances of horrid crime, such as bring home to the heart the natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.

"God," replies Spinoza, calmly, "is the cause of all things which have reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural affection,--none of which things express any positive essence, but the absence of it: and therefore God was not the cause of these, although he was the cause of the act and the intention.

"But once for all," he adds, "this aspect of things will remain intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free will remain unimproved."

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as false as he supposes them, and we have no power to be anything but what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God, they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. Moral evil need not disturb us, if--if we can be nothing but what we are, if we are but as clay.

The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed. We pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which is best disposed of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it is, or whether properly it is anything), the words past, present, future do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them: things will be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now if everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be any time but the present, or how past and future have room for a meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him are, just as every property of a circle exists in it as soon as the circle exists. We may if we like, for convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and say, e.g. that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle under the parts of the one will equal that under the parts of the other. But we only mean in reality that these rectangles are equal; and the future relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing, however, as much as we please, that the condition of England a hundred years hence lies already in embryo in existing causes, it is a paradox to say that such condition exists already in the sense in which the properties of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on the illustration.

It is singular that he should not have noticed the difficulty; not that either it or the answer to it (which no doubt would have been ready enough) are likely to interest any person except metaphysicians, a class of thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.

We proceed to more important matters--to Spinoza's detailed theory of Nature chiefly as exhibited in man and in man's mind, a theory which for its bold ingenuity is the most remarkable which on this dark subject has ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another question; yet undoubtedly it provides an answer for every difficulty; it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy that it will explain phenomena and reconcile difficulties, it is hard to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is.

Most people have heard of the "Harmonie Pre-etablie" of Leibnitz; it is borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the Leibnitzian system. "Man," says Leibnitz, "is composed of mind and body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their union? Substances so opposite in kind, it is impossible to suppose can affect one another; mind cannot act on matter, or matter upon mind; and the appearance of such mutual action of them on each other is an appearance only and a delusion." A delusion so general, however, required to be accounted for; and Leibnitz accounted for it by supposing that God in creating a world, composed of material and spiritual phenomena, ordained from the beginning that these several phenomena should proceed in parallel lines side by side in a constantly corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the retina. The motion of the arm or the leg appears to result from an act of will; but in either case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between substances so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion; and we only suppose that the object seen produces the idea, and that the desire produces the movement, because the phenomena of matter and the phenomena of spirit are so contrived as to flow always in the same order and sequence. This hypothesis, as coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, at least listened to respectfully; because while taking it out of its proper place, he contrived to graft it upon Christianity; and succeeded, with a sort of speculative legerdemain, in making it appear to be in harmony with revealed religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination, and connected with the Christian doctrine of Retribution, it steps forward with an air of unconscious innocence, as if interfering with nothing which Christians generally believe. And yet, leaving as it does no larger scope for liberty or responsibility than when in the hands of Spinoza,* Leibnitz, in our opinion, has only succeeded in making it infinitely more revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as an object of Divine anger and a subject of retributory punishment. He was not a Christian, and made no pretension to be considered such; and it did not occur to him to regard the actions of a being which, both with Leibnitz and himself, is (to use his own expression) an automaton spirituale, as deserving a fiery indignation and everlasting vengeance.

* Since these words were written a book [Refutation lnedite de Spinoza. Par Leibnitz. Precedee d'une Memoire, par Foucher de Carell. Paris. 1854.] has appeared in Paris by an able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead us to modify the opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give our reasons for speaking as we do. M. de Careil has discovered in the library at Hanover a MS. in the handwriting of Leibnitz, containing a series of remarks on the book of a certain John Wachter. It does not appear who this John Wachter was, nor by what accident he came to have so distinguished a critic. If we may judge by the extracts at present before us, he seems to have been an absurd and extravagant person, who had attempted to combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very little which he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza; and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections upon them are of interest to any human being. The extravagance of Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with an opportunity of noticing the points on which he most disapproved of Spinoza himself; and these few notices M. de Caroil has now for the first time published as "The Refutation of Spinoza. by Leibnitz." They are exceedingly brief and scanty; and the writer of them would assuredly have hesitated to describe an imperfect criticism by so ambitious a title. The modern editor, however, must be allowed the privilege of a worshipper, and we will not quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his master had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for what is at least a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude which he has earned by industry and good will. At the same time, the notes themselves confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz did not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than what he is described in the book before us.--if his metaphysics were "miserable," if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes,--we can assure M. de Caroil that we should long ago have heard the last of him.

There must be something else, something very different from this, to explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which his writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of Goethe; and the fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to mere depreciating criticism. This. however, is not a point which there is any use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two assertions which we have made. First, that Leibnitz conceived his "Theory of the Harmonic Pre-etablie" from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and, secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is that of Spinoza, and only differs from it in disguising its real character.

First for the "Harmonic Pre-etablie." Spinoza's "Ethics" appeared in 1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory of "The Communication of Substances," which he illustrates in the following manner:--

"Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver ce que j'ai ovance touchant la communication, ou l'harmonie de deux suhstances aussi differentes que l'ame et le corps? Il est vrai que je crois en avoir trouve le moyen; et voici comment je pretends vous satisfaire. Figurez-vous deux horologes ou montres qui s'accordent parfaitement. Or cela se pent faire de trots manieres. La 1^0 consiste dans une influence mutuelle. La 2^0 est d'y artocher un ouvrier hobile qui les redresse, et lea mette d'accord a tous moments. La 3^0 eat de fabriquer ces deux pendules avec taut d'art et de justesse, qu'on se puisse assurer de leur accord dana la suite. Menez maintenant l'ame et le corps a la place de ces deux pendules; leur accord pent arriver par l'une de ces trois manieres. La voye d'influence eat celle de la philosophic vulgaire; mais comme l'on ne sauroit concevoir des particules materielles qui putssent passer d'une de ces substances dana l'autre, il faut abandonner ce sentiment. La voye de l'assistance continuelle du Createur est celle du systeme des causes occasionnelles; mais je tiens que c'est fake intervenir Deus ex machina dans une chose naturelle et ordinaire, ou selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que de la maniere qu'il concourt a toutes les autres choses naturelles. Ainsi il ne reste que mon hypothese; c'est-a-dire que la voye de l'harmonie. Dieu a fait des le commencement chacune de ces deux substances de telle nature, qu'en ne suivant que ces propres loix qu'elle a recues avec son etre, elle s'accorde pourtant avec l'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une influence mutuelle, ou comme si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au de-la de son coneours general. Apres cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver a moins qu'on ne veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile pout se servir de cette artifice," &c.--leibnitz Opera, p. 133. Berlin edition, 1840.

Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with Christianity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of mind and body wears a very different aspect under his treatment from what it wears under that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and Leibnitz both agree in this one peculiar conception in which they differ from all other philosophers before or after them--that mind and body have no direct communication with each other, and that the phenomena of them merely correspond. M. de Carell says they both borrowed it from Descartes; but that is impossible. Descartes held no such opinion, it was the precise point of disagreement at which Spinoza parted from him: and therefore, since in point of date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we know that Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either suppose that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely improbable, that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards reoriginated for himself one of the most singular and peculiar notions which was ever offered to the belief of mankind.

So much for the first point, which, after all, is but of little moment. It is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands of Leibnitz, this theory can be any better reconciled with what is commonly meant by religion; whether, that is, the ideas of obedience and disobedience, merit and demerit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under it. Spinoza makes no pretension to anything of the kind, and openly declares that these ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes. Leibnitz, in opposition to him, endeavours to re-establish them in the following manner. It is true he conceives that the system of the universe has been arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was launched into being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details, as the best which could exist; but it is carried on by the action of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of their existence. yet obey them with a "character of spontaneity," which although "automata," are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere co-existence of these opposite qualifies in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can coexist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If man can incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us; yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the "Harmonic Pre-etablie," might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful. It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world may be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of its existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil; and although Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and wickedness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with the reflection that this earth might be but one world in the midst of the universe, and perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity of stainless globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because it was imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark subject, when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.

But as soon as we are told that the evil in these "automata" of mankind, being, as it is, a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be justly punished in everlasting fire; our hearts recoil against the paradox.

No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of the singleness of his heart.

"Deus," according to Spinoza's definition, "est ens constans infinitis attributis quorum unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit." Under each of these attributes infinita sequuntur, and everything which an infinite intelligence can conceive, and an infinite power can produce,--everything which follows as a possibility out of the divine nature,--all things which have been, and are, and will be,--find expression and actual existence, not under one attribute only, but under each and every attribute. Language is so ill adapted to such a system, that even to state it accurately is all but impossible, and analogies can only remotely suggest what such expressions mean. But it is as if it were said that the same thought might be expressed in an infinite variety of languages; and not in words only, but in action, in painting, in sculpture, in music, in any form of any kind which can be employed as a means of spiritual embodiment. Of all these infinite attributes two only, as we said, are known to us,--extension and thought. Material phenomena are phenomena of extension; and to every modification of extension an idea corresponds under the attribute of thought. Out of such a compound as this is formed man, composed of body and mind; two parallel and correspondent modifications eternally answering one another. And not man only, but all other beings and things are similarly formed and similarly animated; the anima or mind of each varying according to the complicity of the organism of its material counterpart. Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's power of thinking; and mind does not control body, nor communicate to it either motion or rest or any influence from itself, yet body with all its properties is the object or ideate of mind; whatsoever body does mind perceives, and the greater the energizing power of the first, the greater the perceiving power of the second. And this is not because they are adapted one to the other by some inconceivable preordinating power, but because mind and body are una et eatlent res, the one absolute being affected in one and the same manner, but expressed under several attributes; the modes and affections of each attribute having that being for their cause, as he exists under that attribute of which they are modes and no other; idea being caused by idea, and body affected by body; the image on the retina being produced by the object reflected upon it, the idea or image in our minds by the idea of that object, &c. &c.

A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking on these matters is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly speak of it as being probable, or as being improbable. Probability extends only to what we can imagine as possible, and Spinoza's theory seems to lie beyond the range within which our judgment can exercise itself; in our own opinion, indeed, as we have already said, the entire subject is one with which we have no business; and the explanation of it, if it is ever to be explained to us, is reserved till we are in some other state of existence. We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is in itself incredible. The chances may be millions to one against his being right, yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably at least as strange as his conception of it. But we are firmly convinced that of these questions, and all like them, practical answers only lie within the reach of human faculties; and that in all such "researches into the absolute" we are on the road which ends nowhere.

Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to this philosophy itself, there is one most obvious, viz., that if the attributes of God be infinite, and each particular thing is expressed under them all, then mind and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each of ourselves; and this human nature exists (i.e., there exists corresponding modes of substance) in the whole infinity of the divine nature under attributes differing each from each, and all from mind and all from body. That this must be so, follows obviously from the definition of the Infinite Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two attributes which are known to us; and if this be so, why does not the mind perceive something of all these other attributes? The objection is well expressed by a correspondent (Letter 67):--"It follows from what you say," he writes to Spinoza, "that the modification which constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, although it be one and the same modification, yet must be expressed in an infinity of ways; one way by thought, a second way by extension, a third by some attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the attributes being infinite in number, and the order and connection of modes being the same in them all; why, then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one attribute only?"

Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily a fragment of his letter only is extant, so that it is too brief to be satisfactory.

"In reply to your difficulty," he says, "although each particular thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes, the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite minds. No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connection with another."

He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives, or can perceive, things under their Infinite expression, and that the idea of each several mode, under whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.

We do not know that we can add anything to this explanation; the difficulty lies in the audacious sweep of the speculation itself; we will however attempt an illustration, although we fear it will be to illustrate obscurum tier obscurius. Let A B C D be four out of the Infinite number of the Divine attributes. A the attribute of mind; B the attribute of extension; C and D other attributes, the nature of which is not known to us. Now A, as the attribute of mind, is that which perceives all which takes place under B C and D, but it is only as it exists in God that it forms the universal consciousness of an attributes at once. In its modifications it is combined separately with the modifications of each, constituting in combination with the modes of each attribute a separate being. As forming the mind of B, A perceives what takes place in B, but not what takes place in C or D. Combined with B, it forms the soul of the human body, and generally the soul of all modifications of extended substance; combined with C, it forms the soul of some other analogous being; combined with D, again of another; but the combinations are only in pairs, in which A is constant. A and B make one being, A and C another, A and D a third; but B will not combine with C, nor C with D; each attribute being, as it were, conscious only of itself. And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and extension which we call ourselves there are corresponding modifications under C and D, and generally under each of the Infinite attributes of God; each of ourselves being in a sense Infinite, nevertheless we neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves in this Infinite aspect; our actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of sensible experience.

English readers, however, are likely to care little for all this; they will look to the general theory, and judge of it as its aspect affects them. And first, perhaps, they will be tempted to throw aside as absurd the notion that their bodies go through the many operations which they experience them to do, undirected by their minds; it is a thing they may say at once preposterous and incredible. And no doubt on the first blush it sounds absurd, and yet, on second thoughts, it is less so than it seems; and though we could not persuade ourselves to believe it, absurd in the sense of having nothing to be said for it, it certainly is not. It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human body capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of material organisation, of building a house, than of thinking; and yet men are allowed to say that the body thinks, without being regarded as candidates for a lunatic asylum. We see the seed shoot up into stem and leaf and throw out flowers; we observe it fulfilling processes of chemistry more subtle than were ever executed in Liebig's laboratory, and producing structures more cunning than man can imitate. The bird builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate web and stretches it in the path of his prey; directed not by calculating thought, as we conceive ourselves to be, but by some motive influence, our ignorance of the nature of which we disguise from ourselves, and call it instinct, but which we believe at least to be some property residing in the organisation; and we are not to suppose that the human body, the most complex of all material structures, has slighter powers in it than the bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect. Let us listen to Spinoza himself:--

"There can be no doubt," he says, "that this hypothesis is true, but unless I can prove it from experience, men will not, I fear, be induced even to reflect upon it calmly, so persuaded are they that it is by the mind only that their bodies are set in motion. And yet what body can or cannot do no one has yet determined; body, i.e., by the law of its own nature, and without assistance from mind. No one has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its functions and exhausted the list of them: and there are powers exhibited by animals far exceeding human sagacity; and again, feats are performed by somnambulists on which in the waking state the same persons would never venture --itself a proof that body is able to accomplish what mind can only admire. Men say that mind moves body, but how it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion it can impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious language. They will answer me, that whether or not they understand how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain experience that unless mind could perceive, body would be altogether inactive; they know that it depends on the mind whether the tongue speak or not. But do they not equally experience that if their bodies are paralysed their minds cannot think? That if their bodies are asleep their minds are without power? That their minds are not at all times equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but depend on the state of their bodies? And as for experience proving that the members of the body can be controlled by the mind, I fear experience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd, they rejoin, to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such things as pictures, or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, that we do not vet know what body can or cannot do, or what would naturally follow from the structure of it; that we experience in the feats of somnambulists something which antecedently to that experience would have seemed incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds infinitely any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it."

We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although if the matter were one the debating of which could be of any profit, it would undoubtedly have its weight, and would require to be patiently considered. Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and in which we are trifling with what is inscrutable.

Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself, when he went on to gather out of his philosophy "that the mind of man being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives it, not that he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or that action, we say that God does it not qua he is Infinite, but qua he is expressed in that man's nature." "Here," he says, "many readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them in the way of such a supposition." Undoubtedly there was reason enough to form, such an anticipation. As long as the Being whom he so freely names remains surrounded with the associations which in this country we bring with us out of our child years, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to language such as this. It is not so-- we know it, and it is enough. We are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our ordinary theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion depended on speculative consistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and terrify us. What are we? what is anything? If it be not divine, what is it then? If created--out of what is it created? and how created--and why? These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not care to have them answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to which we will be referred, and conscience declares imperatively that what he says is not true. But of all this it is painful to speak, and as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was nothing else but that world which we experience. It is but one of infinite expressions of Him, a conception which makes us giddy in the effort to realize it.

We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its bearings upon life and human duty. It was in the search after this last, that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we now expect his conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting felicity, and by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them--is the aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy. "Most people," he adds, "deride or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand it; and however extravagant it may be thought in me to do so, I propose to analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical figure." Mind, being, as we have seen, nothing else than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body; we are not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an act. There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is any general abstract volition, but only hic et ille intellectus et haec et illa volitio, and again, by the word Mind, is understood not merely acts of will or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of sensation or emotion. The human body being composed of many small bodies, the mind is similarly composed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind depends on the relation which the component portions maintain towards each other. This is obviously the case with body, and if we can translate metaphysics into common experience, it is equally the case with mind. There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect; a thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental composition; and evidently since one contradicts another, and each has a tendency to become dominant, it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their several activities, in their due and just subordination, that any unity of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After a masterly analysis of all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the principles under which such unity and consistency can be obtained as the condition upon which a being so composed can look for any sort of happiness. And these principles, arrived at as they are by a route so different, are the same, and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same, as those of the Christian Religion.

It might seem impossible in a system which binds together in so inexorable a sequence the relations of cause and effect, to make a place for the action of human self-control; but consideration will show, that however vast the difference between those who deny and those who affirm the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is usually understood), it is not a difference which affects the conduct or alters the practical bearings of it. It is quite possible that conduct may be determined by laws; laws as absolute as those of matter; and yet that the one as well as the other may be brought under control by a proper understanding of those laws. Now, experience seems plainly to say, that while all our actions arise out of desire--that whatever we do, we do for the sake of something which we wish to be or to obtain--we are differently affected towards what is proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we understand the nature of such object in itself and in its consequences. The better we know the better we act, and the fallacy of all common arguments against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room for self-direction; whereas it merely insists in exact conformity with experience on the conditions under which self-determination is possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge. Let a man certainly know that there is poison in the cup of wine before him, and he will not drink it. By the law of cause and effect, his desire for the wine is overcome by the fear of the pain or the death which will follow; and so with everything which comes before him. Let the consequences of any action be clear, definite, and inevitable, and though Spinoza would not say that the knowledge of them will be absolutely sufficient to determine the conduct (because the clearest knowledge may be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the best which we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot do all. On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various tendencies of human nature, called commonly the passions and affections, he returns upon the nature of our ordinary knowledge to derive out of it the means for their control: all these tendencies of themselves seek their own objects--seek them blindly and immoderately; and all the mistakes, and all the unhappinesses of life, arise from the want of due understanding of these objects, and a just subordination of the desire for them. His analysis is remarkably clear; but it is too long for us to enter upon it; the important thing being the character of the control which is to be exerted. And to arrive at this, he employs a distinction of great practical utility, and which is peculiarly his own. Following his tripartite division of knowledge, he finds all kinds of it arrange themselves under one of two classes, and to be either adequate or inadequate. By adequate knowledge he means not necessarily what is exhaustive and complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused: by inadequate, what we know merely as fact either derived from our own sensations, or from the authority of others; but of the connexion of which with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of which we know nothing. We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we are unacquainted with all the properties which belong to it; we conceive it distinctly as a figure generated by the rotation of a line, one end of which is stationary. Phenomena, on the other hand, however made known to us--phenomena of the senses, and phenomena of experience, as long as they remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any higher relation--we can never know except as inadequately. We cannot tell what outward things are, by coming in contact with certain features of them. We have a very imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and the sensations which we experience of various kinds rather indicate to us the nature of these bodies themselves than of the objects which affect them. Now it is obvious that the greater part of mankind act only upon knowledge of this latter kind. The amusements, even the active pursuits of most of us, remain wholly within the range of uncertainty; and, therefore, necessarily are full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues as we expect; we look for pleasure and we find pain; we shun one pain and find a greater; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we so complain of in life-- the disappointments, failures, mortifications which form the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity of the world. Much of all this is inevitable from the constitution of our nature. The mind is too infirm to be entirely occupied with higher knowledge. The conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which cannot be understood by us except with the utmost inadequacy; and the resignation to the higher will which has determined all things in the wisest way, is imperfect in the best of us. Yet much is possible, if not all; and, although through a large tract of life "there comes one event to all, to the wise and to the unwise," "yet wisdom excelleth folly as far as light excelleth darkness." The phenomena of experience by inductive experiment, and just and careful consideration, arrange themselves under laws uniform in their operation, and furnishing a guide to the judgment; and over all things, although the interval must remain unexplored for ever, because what we would search into is Infinite, may be seen the beginning of all things, the absolute eternal God. "Mens humana," Spinoza continues, "quaedam agit, quaedam vero patitur." In so far as it is influenced by inadequate ideas, "eatenus patitur"--it is passive and in bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice: in so far as its ideas are adequate, "eatenus agit"--it is active, it is itself. While we are governed by outward temptations, by the casual pleasures, the fortunes or the misfortunes of life, we are but instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted on by its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which bind it--we are slaves--instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the order of nature, but in ourselves nothing; instruments which are employed for a special work, and which are consumed in effecting it. So far, on the contrary, as we know clearly what we do, as we understand what we are, and direct our conduct not by the passing emotion of the moment, but by a grave, clear, and constant knowledge of what is really good, so far we are said to act--we are ourselves the spring of our own activity--we desire the genuine well-being of our entire nature, and that we can always find, and it never disappoints us when found.

All things desire life, seek for energy, and fuller and ampler being. The component parts of man, his various appetites and passions, are seeking for this while pursuing each its own immoderate indulgence; and it is the primary law of every single being that it so follows what will give it increased vitality. Whatever will contribute to such increase is the proper good of each; and the good of man as a united being is measured and determined by the effect of it upon his collective powers. The appetites gather power from their several objects of desire; but the power of the part is the weakness of the whole; and man as a collective person gathers life, being, and self-mastery only from the absolute good,-- the source of all real good, and truth, and energy,-- that is, God. The love of God is the extinction of all other loves and all other desires; to know God, as far as man can know him, is power, self-government, and peace. And this is virtue, and this is blessedness. Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are brought round to the old conclusions of theology; and Spinoza protests that it is no new doctrine which he is teaching, but that it is one which in various dialects has been believed from the beginning of the world. It is a necessary consequence of the simple propositions that happiness depends on the consistency and coherency of character, and that such coherency can only be given by the knowledge of the One Being, to know whom is to know all things adequately, and to love whom is to have conquered every other inclination. The more entirely our minds rest on Him, the more distinctly we regard all things in their relation to Him, the more we cease to be under the dominion of external things; we surrender ourselves consciously to do His will, and as living men and not as passive things we become the instruments of His power. When the true nature and true causes of our affections become clear to us, they have no more power to influence us. The more we understand, the less can feeling sway us; we know that all things are what they are, because they are so constituted that they could not be otherwise, and we cease to be angry with our brother, we cease to hate him; we shall not fret at disappointment, nor complain of fortune, because no such thing as fortune exists; and if we are disappointed it is better than if we had succeeded, not perhaps for ourselves, yet for the universe. We cannot fear, when nothing can befall us except what God, wills, and we shall not violently hope when the future, whatever it be, will be the best which is possible. Seeing all things in their place in the everlasting order, Past and Future will not affect us. The temptation of present pleasure will not overcome the certainty of future pain, for the pain will be as sure as the pleasure, and we shall see all things under a rule of adamant. The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of their actions: the wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be Himself.

In such a manner, through all the conditions of life, Spinoza pursues the advantages which will accrue to man from the knowledge of God, God and man being what his philosophy has described them. It cannot be denied that it is most beautiful; although much of its beauty is perhaps due to associations which have arisen out of Christianity, and which in the system of pantheism have no proper abiding place. Retaining, indeed, all that is beautiful in Christianity, he even seems to have relieved himself of the more fearful features of the general creed. He acknowledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity with God; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings, all in their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted to them. Doubtless a pleasant exchange and a grateful deliverance, if only we could persuade ourselves that a hundred pages of judiciously arranged demonstrations could really and indeed have worked it for us. If we could indeed believe that we could have the year without its winter, day without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil is unhappily too real a thing to be so disposed of.

Yet if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its entire completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the beauty of his practical rule of life, or the disinterestedness and calm nobility which pervades it. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded. Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive end of all human desire. "Beatitudo non est virtutis pretium, sed ipsa virtus. Nihil aliud est quam ipsa animi acquiescentia, quae ex Dei intuitiva cognitione oritur." And the same spirit of generosity exhibits itself in all his conclusions. The ordinary objects of desire, he says, are of such a kind that for one man to obtain them is for another to lose them; and this alone would suffice to prove that they are not what any man should labour after. But the fullness of God suffices for us all, and he who possesses this good desires only to communicate it to every one, and to make all mankind as happy as himself. And again:-- "The wise man will not speak in society of his neighbour's faults, and sparingly of the infirmity of human nature; but he will speak largely of human virtue and human power, and of the means by which that nature can best be perfected, so to lead men to put away that fear and aversion with which they look on goodness, and learn with relieved hearts to love and desire it." And once more:--"He who loves God will not desire that God should love him in return with any partial or particular affection, for that is to desire that God for his sake should change his everlasting nature and become lower than himself."

One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would seem in such a system to be necessarily wanting. Where individual action is resolved into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all evolving, the individuality of the personal man would at best appear but an evanescent and unreal shadow. Such individuality, however, as we now possess, whatever it be, might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its persistence. And yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an answering dissolution. And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness of what has befallen it in life, "nisi durante corpore." But Spinozism is a philosophy full of surprises; and our calculations of what must belong to it are perpetually baffled. The imagination, the memory, the senses, whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish necessarily and eternally; and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations, who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession of himself, having in life possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance of it with the dissolution of the body.

Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the essence of the mind, united to the mind as the mind is united to the body, and thus there is in the soul something of an everlasting nature which cannot utterly perish. And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his demonstrations, and appeals to the consciousness. In spite of our non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in spite of all difficulties from the dissolution of the body, "Nihilo minus," he says, "sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse. Nam mens non minus res illas sentit quas intelligendo concipit, quam quas in memoria habet. Mentis enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ipsae demonstrationes."

This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls into easy harmony with the rest of the system. As the mind is not a faculty, but an act or acts,--not a power of perception, but the perception itself,--in its high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical language which Coleridge has made popular and perhaps partially intelligible), the object and the subject become one; a difficult expression, but the meaning of which (as it bears on our present subject) may be something of this kind:--If knowledge be followed as it ought to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded in their relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge of particular outward things, of nature, or life, or history, becomes in fact, knowledge of God; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more the mind is raised above what is perishable in the phenomena to the idea or law which lies beyond them. It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal, not upon the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with them, it contracts in itself the character of the objects which possess it. Thus we are emancipated from the conditions of duration; we are liable even to death only quatenus patimur, as we are passive things and not active intelligences; and the more we possess such knowledge and are possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is superseded by the active--so that at last the human soul may "become of such a nature that the portion of it which will perish with the body in in comparison with that of it which shall endure, shall be insignificant and nullius momenti." (Eth v. 38.)

Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate. The account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's labours; his "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" was the forerunner of German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the application of principles laid down in that remarkable work. But this was not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, it was desirable to enter, and we have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most associated with the name of its author. It is this which has been really powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has formed the strong shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with the theories of the most extreme materialism.

It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good) at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the lessons of nature; the sense of that "something" interfused in the material world--

"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;--
A motion and a spirit, which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere denial that it is this. We go on to ask what it is, and we are obliged to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made we are really and truly studying a revelation of himself.

It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral side, that the point of main offence is lying; in that excuse for evil and for evil men which the necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in what fair-sounding words we will. So plain this is that common-sense people, and especially English people, cannot bring themselves even to consider the question without impatience, and turn disdainfully and angrily from a theory which confuses their plain instincts of right and wrong. Although, however, error on this side is infinitely less mischievous than on the other, no vehement error can exist in this world with impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly to what they say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which refuses to hear it.

The popular belief is, that right and wrong lies before every man, and that he is free to choose between them, and the responsibility of choice rests with himself. The fatalist's belief is that every man's actions are determined by causes external and internal over which he has no power, leaving no room for any moral choice whatever. The first is contradicted by plain facts; the second by the instinct of conscience. Even Spinoza allows that for practical purposes we are obliged to regard the future as contingent, and ourselves as able to influence it; and it is incredible that both our inward convictions and our outward conduct should be built together upon a falsehood. But if, as Butler says, whatever be the speculative account of the matter, we are practically forced to regard ourselves as free, this is but half the truth, for it may be equally said that practically we are forced to regard each other as not free; and to make allowance, every moment, for influences for which we cannot hold each other personally responsible. If not, --if every person of sound mind (in the common acceptation of the term) be equally able at all times to act right if only he will,--why all the care which we take of children? why the pains to keep them from bad society? why do we so anxiously watch their disposition, to determine the education which will best answer to it? Why in cases of guilt do we vary our moral censure according to the opportunities of the offender? Why do we find excuses for youth, for inexperience, for violent natural passion, for bad education, bad example? Except that we feel that all these things do affect the culpability of the guilty person, and that it is folly and inhumanity to disregard them. But what we act upon in private life we cannot acknowledge in our general ethical theories, and while our conduct in detail is human and just, we have been contented to gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and coarse generalisations of political necessity. In the swift haste of social life we must indeed treat men as we find them. We have no time to make allowances; and the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a mere impossibility. A thief is a thief in the law's eye though he has been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. Giles's; and definite penalties must be attached to definite acts, the conditions of political life not admitting of any other method of dealing with them. But it is absurd to argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability. The act is one thing, the moral guilt is another. And there are many cases in which, as Butler again allows, if we trace a sinner's history to the bottom, the guilt attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.

This is all plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue to deny or ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, but men who love the truth as much as ourselves), who will see only what we neglect, and will insist upon it, and build their system upon it.

And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those natural tendencies which each of us brings with him into the world,--which we did not make, and yet which almost as much determine what we are to be, as the properties of the seed determine the tree which shall grow from it. Men are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or generous, or affectionate; there is as large difference in their dispositions as in the features of their faces; and that by no original act of their own. Duties which are easy to one, another finds difficult or impossible. It is with morals as it is with art. Two children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the other hardly or never. In vain the master will show him what to do. It seems so easy: it seems as if he had only to will and the thing would be done; but it is not so. Between the desire and the execution lies the incapable organ which only wearily, and after long labour, imperfectly accomplishes what is required of it. And the same, to a certain extent, unless we will deny the plainest facts of experience, holds true in moral actions. No wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognized in their full reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and that the free-will theory be thrown aside as a chimera.

It may be said, and it often is said, that all such reasonings are merely sophistical--that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are conscious that we are free; we know--we are as sure as we are of our existence that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we choose. But this is less plain than it seems; and if we grant it, it proves less than it appears to prove. It may be true that we can act as we choose, but can we choose? Is not our choice determined for us? We cannot determine from the fact, because we always have chosen as soon as we act, and we cannot replace the conditions in such a way as to discover whether we could have chosen anything else. The stronger motive may have determined our volition without our perceiving it; and if we desire to prove our independence of motive, by showing that we can choose something different from that which we should naturally have chosen, we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire becoming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a motive. Again, consciousness of the possession of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly judge what our powers are only by what they have actually accomplished; we know what we have done, and we may infer from having done it, that our power was equal to what it achieved; but it is easy for us to overrate ourselves if we try to measure our abilities in themselves. A man who can leap five yards may think that he can leap six; yet he may try and fail. A man who can write prose may only learn that he cannot write poetry from the badness of the verses which he produces. To the appeal to consciousness of power there is always an answer:--that we may believe ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we may be deceived.

There are, however, another set of feelings which cannot be set aside in this way, which do prove that, in some sense or other, in some degree or other, we are the authors of our own actions,--that there is a point fit which we begin to be responsible for them. It is one of the clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where two or more courses involving moral issues are before us, whether we have a consciousness of power to choose between them or not, we have a consciousness that we ought to choose between them; a sense of duty hoti dei touto prattein, as Aristotle expresses it, which we cannot shake off. Whatever this involves (and some measure of freedom it must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of the two courses we know that one is in the long run the best, and the other more immediately tempting. We have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mere mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power. The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like those of seeing and hearing; and although, like the other senses, they may be mistaken sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence of such feelings at all proves that there is something which corresponds to them. If there be any such things as "true ideas," or clear distinct perceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and according to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it involves. And it involves that somewhere or other the influence of causes ceases to operate, and that some degree of power there is in men of self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured. Speculative difficulties remain in abundance. It will be said in a case, e.g. of moral trial, that there may have been power; but was there power enough to resist the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If there was not, there was no responsibility. We must answer again from a practical instinct. We refuse to allow men to be considered all equally guilty who have committed the same faults; and we insist that their actions must be measured against their opportunities. But a similar conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom. Where that point is, where other influences terminate, and responsibility begins, will always be of intricate and often impossible solution. But if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be--an exception in the order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all life, is a mystery; and as to dissect the body will not reveal the secret of animation, so with the actions of the moral man. The spiritual life, which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away before the logical dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work upon.

[The end]
James Froude's essay: Spinoza

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN