_natural inclinations_ are related to the particular passions.
Sensation and passion arise out of the connexion of body and soul, and
their use is only to urge us to attend to the wants of the former. We
can scarcely hear without a smile the simple monastic legend which
Malebranche weaves together about the original nature of the passions
and their alteration by the Fall. "It is visibly a disorder that a
spirit capable of knowing and loving God should be obliged to occupy
itself with the needs of the body." "A being altogether occupied with
what passes in his body and with the infinity of objects that surround
it cannot be thinking on the things that are truly good."[27] Hence
the necessity of an immediate and instinctive warning from the senses
in regard to the relations of things to our organism, and also of
pains and pleasures which may induce us to attend to this warning.
"Sensible pleasure is the mark that nature has attached to the use of
certain things in order that without having the trouble of examining
them by reason, we may employ them for the preservation of the body,
but not in order that we may love them."[28] Till the Fall the mind
was merely united to the body, not subjected to it, and the influence
of these pleasures and pains was only such as to make men attend to
their bodily wants, but not to occupy the mind, or fill it with
sensuous joys and sorrows, or trouble its contemplation of that which
is really good. Our moral aim should therefore be to restore this
state of things, to weaken our union with the body and strengthen our
union with God. And to encourage us in pursuing this aim we have to
remember that union with God is natural to the spirit, and that, while
even the condition of union with the body is artificial, the condition
of subjection to the body is wholly unnatural to it. Our primary
tendency is towards the supreme good, and we only love the objects of
our passions in so far as we "determine towards particular, and
therefore false goods, the love that God gives us for himself." The
search for happiness is really the search for God in disguise, and
even the levity and inconstancy with which men rush from one finite
good to another, is a proof that they were made for the infinite.
Furthermore, this natural love of God, or inclination for good in
general, "gives us the power of suspending our consent in regard to
those particular goods which do not satisfy it."[29] If we refuse to
be led by the obscure and confused voice of instinctive feeling, which
arises from and always tends to confirm our union with the body, and
wait for the light of reason which arises from and always tends to
confirm our union with God, we have done all that is in our power, the
rest is God's work. "If we only judge precisely of that which we see
clearly, we shall never be deceived. For then it will not be we that
judge, but the universal reason that judges in us."[30] And as our
love, even of particular goods, is a confused love of the supreme
good, so the clear vision of God inevitably brings with it the love of
him. "We needs must love the highest when we see it." When it is the
divine reason that speaks in us it is the divine love that moves us,
"the same love wherewith God loves himself and the things he has
made."[31]
The general result of the ethics of Malebranche is ascetic. The
passions, like the senses, have no relation to the higher life of the
soul; their value is only in relation to the union of soul and body, a
union which is purely accidental or due to the arbitrary will of God.
The more silently they discharge their provisional function, and the
less they disturb or interfere with the pure activity of spirit, the
more nearly they approach to the only perfection that is possible for
them. Their ideal state is to remain or become again simple instincts
that act mechanically like the circulation of the blood. Universal
light of reason casts no ray into the obscurity of sense; its
universal love cannot embrace any of the objects of particular
passion. It is indeed recognized by Malebranche that sensation in man
is mixed with thought, that the passions in him are forms of the love
of good in general. But this union of the rational with the sensuous
nature is regarded merely as a confusion which is to be cleared up,
_not_ in a higher unity of the two elements, but simply by the
withdrawal of the spirit from contact with that which darkens and
defiles it. Of a transformation of sense into thought, of passion into
duty--an elevation of the life of sense till it becomes the embodiment
and expression of the life of reason--Malebranche has no conception.
Hence the life of reason turns with him to mysticism in theory and to
asceticism in practice. His universal is abstract and opposed to the
particular; instead of explaining it, it explains it away.
A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we
view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not
at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to
the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and
not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche
conceived himself to be presenting to the world only the purest and
most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. But if we
obey his own continual advice to think clearly and distinctly, if we
divest his system of all the sensuous and imaginative forms in which
he has clothed it, and reduce it to the naked simplicity of its
central thought, what we find is not a God that reveals himself in the
finite, and to the finite, but the absolute substance which has no
revelation, and whose existence is the negation of all but itself.
Thus to tear away the veil, however, there was needed a stronger,
simpler, and freer spirit--a spirit less influenced by opinion, less
inclined to practical compromise, and gifted with a stronger "faith in
the whispers of the lonely muse" of speculation than Malebranche.
_The Philosophy of Spinoza._--It is a remark of Hegel's that Spinoza, as
a Jew, first brought into European thought the idea of an absolute unity
in which the difference of finite and infinite is lost. Some later
writers have gone further, and attempted to show that the main doctrines
by which his philosophy is distinguished from that of Descartes were due
to the direct influences of Jewish writers like Maimonides, Gersonides,
and Hasdai Crescas, rather than to the necessary development of
Cartesian ideas. And it is undoubtedly true that many points of
similarity with such writers, reaching down even to verbal coincidence,
may be detected in the works of Spinoza, although it is not so easy to
determine how much he owed to their teaching. His own view of his
obligations is sufficiently indicated by the fact, that while in his
ethics he carries on a continual polemic against Descartes, and strives
at every point to show that his own doctrines are legitimately derived
from Cartesian principles, he only once refers to Jewish philosophy as
containing an obscure and unreasoned anticipation of these doctrines.
"Quod quidam Hebraeorum quasi per nebulam vidisse videntur qui scilicet
statuunt Deum Dei intellectum resque ab ipso intellectas unum et idem
esse."[32] It may be that the undeveloped pantheism and rationalism of
the Jewish philosophers had a deeper influence than he himself was aware
of, in emancipating him from the traditions of the synagogue, and giving
to his mind its first philosophical bias. In his earlier work there are
Neoplatonic ideas and expressions which in the _Ethics_ are rejected or
remoulded into a form more suitable to the spirit of Cartesianism. But
the question, after all, has little more than a biographical interest.
In the Spinozistic philosophy there are few differences from Descartes
which cannot be traced to the necessary development of Cartesian
principles; and the comparison of Malebranche shows that a similar
development might take place under the most diverse intellectual
conditions. What is most remarkable in Spinoza is just the freedom and
security with which these principles are followed out to their last
result. His Jewish origin and his breach with Judaism completely
isolated him from every influence but that of the thought that possesses
him. And no scruple or hesitation, no respect for the institutions or
feelings of his time interferes with his speculative consequence. He
exhibits to us the almost perfect type of a mind without superstitions,
which has freed itself from all but reasoned and intelligent
convictions, or, in the Cartesian phrase, "clear and distinct ideas";
and when he fails, it is not by any inconsistency, or arbitrary stopping
short of the necessary conclusions of his logic, but by the essential
defect of his principles.
Geometrical method applied to metaphysics.
Spinoza takes his idea of method from mathematics, and after the
manner of Euclid, places at the head of each book of his _Ethics_ a
certain number of definitions, axioms, and postulates which are
supposed to be intuitively certain, and to form a sufficient basis for
all that follows. Altogether there are twenty-seven definitions,
twenty axioms, and eight postulates. If Spinoza is regarded as the
most consequent of philosophers it cannot be because he has based his
system upon so many fragmentary views of truth; it must be because a
deeper unity has been discerned in the system than is visible on the
first aspect of it. We must, therefore, to a certain extent
distinguish between the form and the matter of his thought, though it
is also true that the defective form itself involves a defect in the
matter.
What in the first instance recommends the geometrical method to
Spinoza is, not only its apparent exactness and the necessity of its
sequence, but, so to speak, its disinterestedness. Confusion of
thought arises from the fact that we put ourselves, our desires and
feelings and interests, into our view of things; that we do not regard
them as they are in themselves, in their essential nature, but look
for some final cause, that is, some relation to ourselves by which
they may be explained. For this reason, he says, "the truth might for
ever have remained hid from the human race, if mathematics, which
looks not to the final cause of figures, but to their essential nature
and the properties involved in it, had not set another type of
knowledge before them." To understand things is to see how all that is
true of them flows from the clear and distinct idea expressed in their
definition, and ultimately, it is to see how all truth flows from the
_essentia Dei_ as all geometrical truth flows from the idea of
quantity. To take a mathematical view of the universe, therefore, is
to raise ourselves above all consideration of the end or tendency of
things, above the fears and hopes of mortality into the region of
truth and necessity. "When I turned my mind to this subject," he says
in the beginning of his treatise on politics, "I did not propose to
myself any novel or strange aim, but simply to demonstrate by certain
and indubitable reason those things which agree best with practice.
And in order that I might inquire into the matters of this science
with the same freedom of mind with which we are wont to treat lines
and surfaces in mathematics, I determined not to laugh or to weep over
the actions of men, but simply to understand them; and to contemplate
their affections and passions, such as love, hate, anger, envy,
arrogance, pity and all other disturbances of soul not as vices of
human nature, but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as
heat, cold, storm, thunder pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.
For these, though troublesome, are yet necessary, and have certain
causes through which we may come to understand them, and thus, by
contemplating them in their truth, gain for our minds as much joy as
by the knowledge of things that are pleasing to the senses." All our
errors as to the nature of things arise from our judging them from the
point of view of the part and not of the whole, from appoint of view
determined by their relation to our own individual being, and not from
a point of view determined by the nature of the things themselves; or,
to put the same thing in another way, from the point of view of sense
and imagination, and not from the point of view of intelligence.
Mathematics shows us the inadequacy of such knowledge when it takes us
out of ourselves into things, and when it presents these things to us
as objects of universal intelligence apart from all special relation
to our individual feelings. And Spinoza only wishes that the same
universality and freedom of thought which belongs to mathematics,
because its objects _do not_ interest the passions, should be extended
to those objects that _do_ interest them. Purity from interest is the
first condition of the philosopher's being; he must get beyond the
illusion of sense and passion that makes our own lives so supremely
important and interesting to us simply because they are our own. He
must look at the present as it were through an inverted telescope of
reason, that will reduce it to its due proportion and place in the sum
of things. To the heat of passion and the higher heat of imagination,
Spinoza has only one advice--"Acquaint yourself with God and be at
peace." Look not to the particular but to the universal, view things
not under the form of the finite and temporal, but _sub quadam specie
aeternitatis._
Sense the source of error.
The illusion of the finite--the illusion of sense, imagination and
passion, which, in Bacon's language, tends to make men judge of things
_ex analogia hominis_ and not _ex analogia universi_, which raises the
individual life, and even the present moment of the individual life,
with its passing feelings, into the standard for measuring the
universe--this, in the eyes of Spinoza, is the source of all error and
evil to man. On the other hand, his highest good is to live the
universal life of reason, or what is the same thing, to view all
things from their centre in God, and to be moved only by the passion
for good in general, "the intellectual love of God." In the treatise
_De Emendatione Intellectus_, Spinoza takes up this contrast in the
first instance from its moral side. "All our felicity or infelicity is
founded on the nature of the object to which we are joined by love."
To love the things that perish is to be in continual trouble and
disturbance of passion; it is to be full of envy and hatred towards
others who possess them; it is to be ever striving after that which,
when we attain it, does not satisfy us; or lamenting over the loss of
that which inevitably passes away from us; only "love to an object
that is infinite and eternal feeds the soul with a changeless and
unmingled joy." But again our love rests upon our knowledge; if we saw
things as they really are we should love only the highest object. It
is because sense and imagination give to the finite an independence
and substantiality that do not belong to it, that we waste our love
upon it as if it were infinite. And as the first step towards truth is
to understand our error, so Spinoza proceeds to explain the defects of
common sense, or in other words, of that first and unreflected view of
the world which he, like Plato, calls opinion. Opinion is a kind of
knowledge derived partly from hearsay, and partly from _experientia
vaga_. It consists of vague and general conceptions of things, got
either from the report of others or from an experience which has not
received any special direction from intelligence. The mind that has
not got beyond the stage of opinion takes things as they present
themselves in its individual experience; and its beliefs grow up by
association of whatever happens to have been found together in that
experience. And as the combining principle of the elements of opinion
is individual and not universal, so its conception of the world is at
once fragmentary and accidental. It does not see things in their
connexion with the unity of the whole, and hence it cannot see them in
their true relation to each other. "I assert expressly," says Spinoza,
"that the mind has no adequate conception either of itself or of
external things, but only a confused knowledge of them, so long as it
perceives them only in the common order of nature, i.e. so long as it
is _externally determined_ to contemplate this or that object by the
accidental concourse of things, and so long as it is not _internally_
determined by the unity of thought in which it considers a number of
things to understand their agreements, differences and
contradictions."[33]
Vices of abstraction and imagination.
There are two kinds of errors which are usually supposed to exclude
each other, but which Spinoza finds to be united in opinion. These are
the errors of abstraction and imagination; the former explains its
vice by defect, the latter its vice by excess. On the one hand,
opinion is abstract and one-sided; it is defective in knowledge and
takes hold of things only at one point. On the other hand, and just
because of this abstractness and one-sidedness, it is forced to give
an artificial completeness and independence to that which is
essentially fragmentary and dependent. The word "abstract" is
misleading, in so far as we are wont to associate with abstraction the
idea of a mental effort by which parts are separated from a given
whole; but it may be applied without violence to any imperfect
conception, in which things that are really elements of a greater
whole are treated as if they were _res completae_, independent
objects, complete in themselves. And in this sense the ordinary
consciousness of man is often the victim of abstractions when it
supposes itself most of all to be dealing with realities. The essences
and substances of the schoolman may delude him, but he cannot think
these notions clearly without seeing that they are only abstract
elements of reality, and that they have a meaning only in relation to
the other elements of it. But common sense remains unconscious of its
abstractness because imagination gives a kind of substantiality to the
fragmentary and limited, and so makes it possible to conceive it as an
independent reality. Pure intelligence seeing the part as it is in
itself could never see it but as a part. Thought, when it rises to
clearness and distinctness in regard to any finite object, must at
once discern its relation to other finite objects and to the
whole,--must discern, in Spinozistic language, that it is "modal" and
not "real." But though it is not possible to _think_ the part as a
whole it is possible to picture it as a whole. The limited image that
fills the mind's eye seems to need nothing else for its reality. We
cannot think a house clearly and distinctly in all the connexion of
its parts with each other without seeing its necessary relation to the
earth on which it stands, to the pressure of the atmosphere, &c. The
very circumstances by which the possibility of such an existence is
explained make it impossible to conceive it apart from other things.
But nothing hinders me from resting on a house as a complete picture
by itself. Imagination represents things in the externality of space
and time, and is subjected to no other conditions but those of space
and time. Hence it can begin anywhere and stop anywhere. For the same
cause it can mingle and confuse together all manner of inconsistent
forms--can imagine a man with a horse's head, a candle blazing in
vacuo, a speaking tree, a man changed into an animal. There may be
elements in the nature of these things that would prevent such
combinations; but these elements are not necessarily present to the
ordinary consciousness, the abstractness of whose conceptions leaves
it absolutely at the mercy of imagination or accidental association.
To thought in this stage anything is possible that can be pictured.
On the other hand, as knowledge advances, this freedom of combination
becomes limited, "the less the mind understands and the more it
perceives the greater is its power of fiction, and the more it
understands the narrower is the limitation of that power. For just as
in the moment of consciousness we cannot imagine that we do not think,
so after we have apprehended the nature of body we cannot conceive of
a fly of infinite size, and after we know the nature of a soul we
cannot think of it as a square, though we may use the words that
express these ideas."[34] Thus, according to Spinoza, the range of
possibility narrows as knowledge widens, until to perfected knowledge
posibility is lost in necessity.
Insufficiency of the individual.
From these considerations it follows that all thought is imperfect
that stops short of the absolute unity of all things. Our first
imperfect notion of things as isolated from each other, or connected
only by co-existence and succession, is a mere imagination of things.
It is a fictitious substantiation of isolated moments in the eternal
Being. Knowledge, so far as it deals with the finite, is engaged in a
continual process of self-correction which can never be completed, for
at every step there is an element of falsity, in so far as the mind
rests in the contemplation of a certain number of the elements of the
world, as if they constituted a complete whole by themselves, whereas
they are only a part, the conception of which has to be modified at
the next step of considering its relation to the other parts. Thus we
rise from individuals of the first to individuals of the second order,
and we cannot stop short of the idea of "all nature as one individual
whose parts vary through an infinite number of modes, without change
of the whole individual."[35] At first we think of pieces of matter as
independent individuals, either because we can picture them
separately, or because they preserve a certain proportion or relation
of parts through their changes. But on further consideration, these
apparent substances sink into modes, each of which is dependent on all
the others. All nature is bound together by necessary law, and not an
atom could be other than it is without the change of the whole world.
Hence it is only in the whole world that there is any true
individuality or substance. And the same principle applies to the
minds of men. Their individuality is a mere semblance caused by our
abstraction from their conditions. Isolate the individual man, and he
will not display the character of a thinking being at all. His whole
spiritual life is bound up with his relations to other minds, past and
present. He has such a life, only in and through that universal life
of which he is so infinitesimal a part that his own contribution to it
is as good as nothing. "Vis qua homo in existendo perseverat limitata
est, et a potentia causarum externarum infinite superatur."[36] What
can be called his own? His body is a link in a cyclical chain of
movement which involves all the matter of the world, and which as a
whole remains without change through all. His mind is a link in a
great movement of thought, which makes him the momentary organ and
expression of one of its phases. His very consciousness of self is
marred by a false abstraction, above which he must rise ere he can
know himself as he really is.
"Let us imagine," says Spinoza in his fifteenth letter, "a little worm
living in blood which has vision enough to discern the particles of
blood, lymph, &c., and reason enough to observe how one particle is
repelled by another with which it comes into contact, or communicates
a part of its motion to it. Such a worm would live in the blood as we
do in this part of the universe, and would regard each particle of it,
not as a part, but as a whole, nor could it know how all the parts are
influenced by the universal nature of the blood, and are obliged to
accommodate themselves to each other as is required by that nature, so
that they co-operate together according to a fixed law. For if we
suppose that there are no causes outside of the blood which could
communicate new motions to it, and no space beyond the blood, nor any
other bodies to which its particles could transfer their motion, it is
certain that the blood as a whole would always maintain its present
state, and its particles would suffer no other variations than those
which may be inferred from the given relation of the motion of the
blood to lymph, chyle, &c. And thus in that case the blood would
require to be considered always as a whole and not as a part. But
since there are many other causes which influence the laws of the
nature of blood, and are in turn influenced thereby, other motions and
other variations must arise in the blood which are not due to the
proportion of motion in its constituents but also to the relation
between that motion and external causes. And therefore we cannot
consider the blood as a whole, but only as a part of a greater whole."
"Now we can think, and indeed ought to think, of all natural bodies in
the same manner in which we have thought of this blood, for all bodies
are surrounded by other bodies, and reciprocally determine and are
determined by them, to exist and operate in a fixed and definite way,
so as to preserve the same ratio of motion and rest in the whole
universe. Hence it follows that every body, in so far as it exists
under a certain definite modification, ought to be considered as
merely a part of the whole universe which agrees with its whole, and
thereby is in intimate union with all the other parts; and since the
nature of the universe is not limited like that of the blood, but
absolutely infinite, it is clear that by this nature, with its
infinite powers, the parts are modified in an infinite number of ways,
and compelled to pass through an infinity of variations. Moreover,
when I think of the universe as a substance, I conceive of a still
closer union of each part with the whole; for, as I have elsewhere
shown, it is the nature of substance to be infinite, and therefore
every single part belongs to the nature of the corporeal substance, so
that apart therefrom it neither can exist nor be conceived. And as to
the human mind, I think of it also as of part of nature, for I think
of nature as having in it an infinite power of thinking, which, as
infinite, contains in itself the idea of all nature, and whose
thoughts run parallel with all existence."
The whole dominates the parts.
From this point of view it is obvious that our knowledge of things
cannot be real and adequate, except in so far as it is determined by
the idea of the whole, and proceeds from the whole to the parts. A
knowledge that proceeds from part to part must always be imperfect; it
must remain external to its object, it must deal in abstractions or
mere _entia rationis_, which it may easily be led to mistake for
realities. Hence Spinoza, like Plato, distinguishes reason whose
movement is regressive (from effect to cause, from variety to unity)
from _scientia intuitiva_, whose movement is progressive, which
"proceeds from the adequate idea of certain of God's attributes to an
adequate knowledge of the nature of things."[37] The latter alone
deserves to be called science in the highest sense of the term. "For
in order that our mind may correspond to the exemplar of nature, it
must develop all its ideas from the idea that represents the origin
and source of nature, so that that idea may appear as the source of
all other ideas."[38] The regressive mode of knowledge has its highest
value in preparing for the progressive. The knowledge of the finite,
ere it can become perfectly adequate, must be absorbed and lost in the
knowledge of the infinite.
Finite things modes of infinite substance.
In a remarkable passage in the _Ethics_, Spinoza declares that the
defect of the common consciousness of men lies not so much in their
ignorance, either of the infinite or of the finite, as in their
incapacity for bringing the two thoughts together, so as to put the
latter in its proper relation to the former. All are ready to confess
that God is the cause both of the existence and of the nature of
things created, but they do not realize what is involved in this
confession--and hence they treat created things as if they were
substances, that is, as if they were Gods. "Thus while they are
contemplating finite things, they think of nothing less than of the
divine nature; and again when they turn to consider the divine nature,
they think of nothing less than of their former fictions on which they
have built up the knowledge of finite things, as if these things could
contribute nothing to our understanding of the divine nature. Hence it
is not wonderful that they are always contradicting themselves."[39]
As Spinoza says elsewhere, it belongs to the very nature of the human
mind to know God, for unless we know God we could know nothing else.
The idea of the absolute unity is involved in the idea of every
particular thing, yet the generality of men, deluded by sense and
imagination, are unable to bring this implication into clear
consciousness, and hence their knowledge of God does not modify their
view of the finite. It is the business of philosophy to correct this
defect, to transform our conceptions of the finite by relating it to
the infinite, to complement and complete the partial knowledge
produced by individual experience by bringing it into connexion with
the idea of the whole. And the vital question which Spinoza himself
prompts us to ask is how far and in what way this transformation is
effected in the Spinozistic philosophy.
There are two great steps in the transformation of knowledge by the
idea of unity as that idea is conceived by Spinoza. The first step
involves a change of the conception of individual finite things by
which they lose their individuality, their character as independent
substances, and come to be regarded as modes of the infinite. But
secondly, this negation of the finite as such is not conceived as
implying the negation of the distinction between mind and matter. Mind
and matter still retain that absolute opposition which they had in the
philosophy of Descartes, even after all limits have been removed. And
therefore in order to reach the absolute unity, and transcend the
Cartesian dualism, a second step is necessary, by which the
independent substantiality of mind and matter is withdrawn, and they
are reduced into attributes of the one infinite substance. Let us
examine these steps successively.
Application to nature of matter.
The method by which the finite is reduced into a mode of the infinite
has already been partially explained. Spinoza follows to its
legitimate result the metaphysical or logical principles of Descartes
and Malebranche. According to the former, as we nave seen, the finite
presupposes the infinite, and, indeed, so far as it is real, it is
identical with the infinite. The infinite is absolute reality, because
it is pure affirmation, because it is that which _negationem nullam
involvit_. The finite is distinguished from it simply by its limit,
i.e. by its wanting something which the infinite has. At this point
Spinoza takes up the argument. If the infinite be the real, and the
finite, so far as it is distinguished therefrom, the unreal, then the
supposed substantiality or individuality of finite beings is an
illusion. In itself the finite is but an abstraction, to which
imagination has given an apparent independence. All limitation or
determination is negative, and in order to apprehend positive reality
we must abstract from limits. By denying the negative, we reach the
affirmative; by annihilating finitude in our thought, and so undoing
the illusory work of the imagination, we reach the indeterminate or
unconditioned being which alone truly is. All division, distinction
and relation are but _entia rationis._ Imagination and abstraction can
give to them, as they can give to mere negation and nothingness, "a
local habitation and a name," but they have no objective meaning, and
in the highest knowledge, in the _scientia intuitiva_, which deals
only with reality, they must entirely disappear. Hence to reach the
truth as to matter, we must free ourselves from all such ideas as
figure or number, measure or time, which imply the separation and
relation of parts. Thus in his 50th letter, in answer to some question
about figure, Spinoza says, "to prove that figure is negation, and not
anything positive, we need only consider that the whole of matter
conceived indefinitely, or in its infinity, can have no figure; but
that figure has a place only in finite or determinate bodies. He who
says that he perceives figure, says only that he has before his mind a
limited thing and the manner in which it is limited. But this
limitation does not pertain to a thing in its 'esse,' but contrariwise
in its 'non-esse' (i.e. it signifies, not that some positive quality
belongs to the thing, but that something is wanting to it). Since,
then, figure is but limitation, and limitation is but negation, we
cannot say that figure is anything." The same kind of reasoning is
elsewhere (_Epist._ 29) applied to solve the difficulties connected
with the divisibility of space or extension. Really, according to
Spinoza, extension is indivisible, though modally it is divisible. In
other words, parts _ad infinitum_ may be taken in space by the
abstracting mind, but these parts have no separate existence. You
cannot rend space, or take one part of it out of its connexion with
other parts. Hence arises the impossibility of asserting either that
there is an infinite number of parts in space, or that there is not.
The solution of the antinomy is that neither alternative is true.
There are many things "quae nullo numero explicari possunt," and to
understand these things we must abstract altogether from the idea of
number. The contradiction arises entirely from the application of that
idea to the infinite. We cannot say that space has a finite number of
parts, for every finite space must be conceived as itself included in
infinite space. Yet, on the other hand, an infinite number is an
absurdity; it is a number which is not a number. We escape the
difficulty only when we see that number is a category inapplicable to
the infinite, and this to Spinoza means that it is not applicable to
reality, that it is merely an abstraction, or _ens imaginationis._
Nature of mind.
The same method which solves the difficulties connected with the
nature of matter is applied to mind. Here also we reach the reality,
or thing in itself, by abstracting from all determination. All
conceptions, therefore, that involve the independence of the finite,
all conceptions of good, evil, freedom and responsibility disappear.
When W. Blyenburg accuses Spinoza of making God the author of evil,
Spinoza answers that evil is an _ens rationis_ that has no existence
for God. "Evil is not something positive, but a state of privation,
and that not in relation to the divine, but simply in relation to the
human intelligence. It is a conception that arises from that
generalizing tendency of our minds, which leads us to bring all beings
that have the external form of man under one and the same definition,
and to suppose that they are all equally capable of the highest
perfection we can deduce from such a definition. When, therefore, we
find an individual whose works are not consistent with this
perfection, straightway we judge that he is deprived of it, or that he
is diverging from his own nature,--a judgment we should never make if
we had not thus referred him to a general definition, and supposed him
to be possessed of the nature it defines. But since God does not know
things abstractly, or through such general definitions, and since
there cannot be more reality in things than the divine intelligence
and power bestows upon them, it manifestly follows that the defect
which belongs to finite things, cannot be called a privation in
relation to the intelligence of God, but only in relation to the
intelligence of man."[40] Thus evil and good vanish when we consider
things _sub specie aeternitatis_, because they are categories that
imply a certain independence in finite beings. For the idea of a moral
standard implies a relation of man to the absolute good, a relation of
the finite to the infinite, in which the finite is not simply lost and
absorbed in the infinite. But Spinoza can admit no such relation. In
the presence of the infinite the finite disappears, for it exists only
by abstraction and negation; or it _seems_ to us to exist, not because
of what is present to our thoughts, but because of what is not present
to them. As we think ourselves free because we are conscious of our
actions but not of their causes, so we think that we have an
individual existence only because the infinite intelligence is not
wholly but only partially realized in us. But as we cannot really
divide space, though we can think of a part of it, so neither can we
place any real division in the divine intelligence. In this way we can
understand how Spinoza is able to speak of the human mind as part of
the infinite thought of God, and of the human body as part of the
infinite extension of God, while yet he asserts that the divine
substance is simple, and not made up of parts. So far as they exist,
they must be conceived as parts of the divine substance, but when we
look directly at that divine substance their separate existence
altogether disappears.
Soul and body.
Spinoza's refuge from Descartes' dualism.
It has, however, been already mentioned that this ascending movement
of abstraction does not at once and directly bring Spinoza to the
absolute unity of substance. The principle that "determination is
negation," and that therefore the absolute reality is to be found only
in the indeterminate, would lead us to expect this conclusion; but the
Cartesian dualism prevents Spinoza from reaching it. Mind and matter
are so absolutely opposed, that even when we take away all limit and
determination from both, they still retain their distinctness. Raised
to infinity, they still refuse to be identified. We are forced,
indeed, to take from them their substantial or substantive existence,
for there can be no other substance but God, who includes all reality
in himself. But though reduced to attributes of a common substance,
the difference of thought and extension is insoluble. The independence
of individual finite things disappears whenever we substitute thought
for imagination, but even to pure intelligence, extension remains
extension, and thought remains thought. Spinoza seems therefore
reduced to a dilemma; he cannot surrender either the unity or the
duality of things, yet he cannot relate them to each other. The only
course left open to him is to conceive each attribute in its turn as
the whole substance, and to regard their difference as the difference
of expression. As the patriarch was called by the two names of Jacob
and Israel, under different aspects, each of which included the whole
reality of the man, so our minds apprehend the absolute substance in
two ways, each of which expresses its whole nature.[41] In this way
the extremes of absolute identity and absolute difference seem to be
reconciled. There is a complete parallelism of thought and extension,
"ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum,"[42] yet
there is also a complete independence and absence of relation between
them, for each is the whole. A thing in one expression cannot be
related to itself in another expression. Hence in so far as we look at
the substance under the attribute of thought, we must take no account
of extension, and in so far as we look at it under the attribute of
extension, we must equally refuse to take any account of thought. This
parallelism may be best illustrated by Spinoza's account of the
relation of the human soul and body. The soul is the idea of the body,
and the body is the object of the soul, whatever is in the one really
is in the other ideally; yet this relation of object and subject does
not imply any connexion. The motions and changes of the body have to
be accounted for partly by itself, partly by the influence of other
bodies; and the thoughts of the soul in like manner have to be
accounted for partly by what God thinks as constituting the individual
mind, and partly by what he thinks as constituting the minds of other
individuals. But to account for thought by the motions of the body, or
for the motions of the body by thought, is to attempt to bridge the
impassable gulf between thought and extension. It involves the double
absurdity of accounting for a thing by itself, and of accounting for
it by that which has nothing in common with it.
Spinoza's higher idealsim.
In one point of view, this theory of Spinoza deserves the highest
praise for that very characteristic which probably excited most odium
against it at the time it was first published, namely, its exaitation
of matter. It is the mark of an imperfect spiritualism to hide its
eyes from outward nature, and to shrink from the material as impure
and defiling. But its horror and fear are proofs of weakness; it flies
from an enemy it cannot overcome. Spinoza's bold identification of
spirit and matter, God and nature, contains in it the germ of a higher
idealism than can be found in any philosophy that asserts the claims
of the former at the expense of the latter. A system that begins by
making nature godless, will inevitably end, as Schelling once said, in
making God unnatural. The expedients by which Descartes keeps matter
at a distance from God, were intended to maintain his pure
spirituality; but their ultimate effect was seen in his reduction of
the spiritual nature to mere will. As Christianity has its superiority
over other religions in this, that it does not end with the opposition
of the human to the divine, the natural to the spiritual, but
ultimately reconciles them, so a true idealism must vindicate its
claims by absorbing materialism into itself. It was, therefore, a true
instinct of philosophy that led Spinoza to raise matter to the
co-equal of spirit, and at the same time to protest against the
Cartesian conception of matter as mere inert mass, moved only by
impulse from without. "What were a God that only impelled the world
from without?" says Goethe. "It becomes him to stir it by an inward
energy, to involve nature in himself, himself in nature, so that that
which lives and moves and has a being in him can never feel the want
of his power or his spirit."
Logical diffculties in Spinoza's metaphysics.
While, however, Spinoza thus escapes some of the inconsequences of
Descartes, the contradiction that was _implicit_ in the Cartesian
system between the duality and the unity, the attributes and the
substance, in his system becomes _explicit_. When so great emphasis is
laid upon the unity of substance, it becomes more difficult to explain
the difference of the attributes. The result is, that Spinoza is
forced to account for it, not by the nature of substance itself, but
by the nature of the intelligence to which it is revealed. "By
substance," he says, "I understand that which is in itself, and is
conceived through itself. By attribute I understand the same thing,
nisi quod attributum dicatur respectu inteltectus substantiae certum
talem naturam tribuentis."[43] Hence we are naturally led with J.E.
Erdmann to think of the intelligence dividing the substance as a kind
of prism that breaks the white light into different colours, through
each of which the same world is seen, only with a different aspect.
But if the intelligence in itself is but a mode of one of the
attributes, how can it be itself the source of their distinction?
The key to this difficulty is that Spinoza has really, and almost in
spite of his logical principles, two opposite conceptions of
substance, between which he alternates without ever bringing them to a
unity. On the one hand, in accordance with the principle that
determination is negation, substance must be taken as that which is
utterly indeterminate, like the Absolute of the Buddhist, which we can
characterize only by denying of it everything that we assert of the
finite. In this view, no predicate can be applied univocally to God
and to the creatures; he differs from them, not only in existence, but
in essence.[44] If we follow out this view to its legitimate result,
God is withdrawn into his own absolute unity, and no difference of
attributes can be ascribed to him, except in respect of something else
than himself. It is owing to the defects of out intelligence that he
appears under different forms or expressions; in himself he is pure
being, without form or expression at all. But, on the other hand, it
is to be observed, that while Spinoza really proceeds by abstraction
and negation, he does not _mean_ to do so. The abstract is to him the
unreal and imaginary, and what he means by substance is not simply
Being in general, the conception that remains when we omit all that
distinguishes the particulars, but the absolute totality of things
conceived as a unity in which all particular existence is included and
subordinated. Hence at a single stroke the indeterminate passes into
the most determinate Being, the Being with no attributes at all into
the Being constituted by an infinite number of attributes. And while,
under the former conception, the defect of our intelligence seemed to
be that it divided the substance, or saw a difference of attributes in
its absolute unity, under the second conception its defect lies in its
apprehending only two out of the infinite multitude of these
attributes.
To do justice to Spinoza, therefore, we must distinguish between the
actual effect of his logic and its effect as he conceived it. The
actual effect of his logic is to dissolve all in the ultimate
abstraction of Being, from which we can find no way back to the
concrete. But his intent was simply to relate all the parts to that
absolute unity which is the presupposition of all thought and being,
and so to arrive at the most concrete and complete idea of the reality
of things. He failed to see what is involved in his own principle that
determination is negation; for if affirmation is impossible without
negation, then the attempt to divorce the two from each other, the
attempt to find a purely affirmative being, must necessarily end in
the barest of all abstractions being confused with the unity of all
things. But even when the infinite substance is defined as the
negative of the finite, the idea of the finite becomes an essential
element in the conception of the infinite. Even the Pantheist, who
says that God is what finite things are not, in spite of himself
recognizes that God has a relation to finite things. Finite things may
in his eyes have no positive relation to God, yet they have a negative
relation; it is through their evanescence and transitoriness, through
their nothingness, that the eternal, the infinite reality alone is
revealed to him. Spinoza is quite conscious of this process, conscious
that he reaches the affirmation of substance by a negation of what he
conceives as the purely negative and unreal existence of finite
things, but as he regards the assertion of the finite as merely an
illusion due to _our_ imagination, so he regards the correction of
this illusion, the negation of the finite as a movement of reflection
which belongs merely to our intelligence, and has nothing to do with
the nature of substance in itself. We find the true affirmation by the
negation of the negative, but in itself affirmation has no relation to
negation. Hence his absolute being is the dead all-absorbing substance
and not the self-revealing spirit. It is the being without
determination, and not the being that determines itself. There is no
reason in the nature of substance why it should have either attributes
or modes; neither individual finite things nor the general distinction
of mind and matter can be deduced from it. The descending movement of
thought is not what Spinoza himself said it should be, an evolution,
but simply an external and empirical process by which the elements
dropped in the ascending movement of abstraction are taken up again
with a merely nominal change. For the sole difference in the
conception of mind and matter as well as in the conception of
individual minds and bodies which is made by their reference to the
idea of God, is that they lose their substantive character and become
adjectives. Aristotle objected to Plato that his ideas were merely
[Greek: aistheta aidia], that is, that his idealization of the world
was merely superficial, and left the things idealized very much what
they were before to the sensuous consciousness; and the same may be
said of Spinoza's negation of finite things. It was an external and
imperfect negation, which did not transform the idea of the finite,
but merely substituted the names of attributes and modes for the names
of general and individual substances.
The same defective logic, by which the movement of thought in
determining the substance is regarded as altogether external to the
substance itself, is seen again in Spinoza's conceptions of the
relations of the attributes to each other. Adopting the Cartesian
opposition of mind and matter, he does not see, any more than
Descartes, that in their opposition they are correlative. Or if he did
see it (as seems possible from a passage in his earliest
treatise),[45] he regarded the correlation as merely subjective,
merely belonging to our thought. They are to him only the two
attributes which we happen to know out of the infinite number
belonging to God. There is no necessity that the substance should
manifest itself in just these attributes and no others, for abstract
substance is equally receptive of all determinations, and equally
indifferent to them all. Just because the unity is merely generic, the
differences are accidental, and do not form by their union any
complete whole. If Spinoza had seen that matter in itself is the
correlative opposite of mind in itself, he need not have sought by
abstracting from the difference of these elements to reach a unity
which is manifested in that very difference, and his absolute would
have been not substance but spirit. This idea he never reached, but we
find him approximating to it in two ways. On the one hand, he condemns
the Cartesian conception of matter as passive and self-external, or
infinitely divisible--as, in short, the mere opposite of thought.[46]
And sometimes he insists on the parallelism of extension and thought
at the expense of their opposition in a way that almost anticipates
the assertion by Leibnitz of the essential identity of mind and
matter. On the other hand, he recognizes that this parallelism is not
complete. Thought is not like a picture; it is conscious, and
conscious not only of itself, but of extension. It transcends
therefore the absolute distinction between itself and other
attributes. It is only because he cannot rid himself of the phantom of
an extended matter as a thing in itself, which is entirely different
from the idea of it, that Spinoza is prevented from recognising in
mind that unity that transcends all distinctions, even its own
distinction from matter. As it is, his main reason for saying that
intelligence is not an attribute of God, but merely a mode, seems to
be this, that the thought of God must be conceived as producing its
own object, i.e. as transcending the distinction of subject and object
which is necessary to our intelligence.[47] But this argument of
itself points to a concrete quite as much as to an abstract unity. It
is as consistent with the idea of absolute spirit as with that of
absolute substance. Spinoza's deliberate and formal doctrine is
undoubtedly the latter; but he constantly employs expressions which
imply the former, as when he speaks of God as _causa sui_. The higher
idea inspires him, though his consciousness only embraces the lower
idea.
Spinoza's ethical system.
The ethical philosophy of Spinoza is determined by the same principles
and embarrassed by the same difficulties as his metaphysics. In it
also we find the same imperfect conception of the relation of the
positive to the negative elements, and, as a consequence, the same
confusion of the highest unity of thought, the affirmation that
subordinates and transcends all negation with mere abstract
affirmation. Or, to put the same thing in ethical language, Spinoza
teaches a morality which is in every point the opposite of asceticism,
a morality of self-assertion or self-seeking, and not of self-denial.
The _conatus sese conservandi_ is to him the supreme principle of
virtue;[48] yet this self-seeking is supposed, under the guidance of
reason, to identify itself with the love of man and the love of God,
and to find blessedness not in the reward of virtue, but in virtue
itself. It is only confusion of thought and false mysticism that could
object to this result on the ground of the element of self still
preserved in the _amor Dei intellectualis_. For it is just the power
of identifyihg himself with that which is wider and higher than his
individual being that makes morality possible to man. But the
difficulty lies in this, that Spinoza will not admit the negative
element, the element of mortification or sacrifice, into morality at
all, even as a moment of transition. For him there is no dead self, by
which we may rise to higher things, no losing of life that we may find
it. For the negative is nothing, it is evil in the only sense in which
evil exists, and cannot be the source of good. The higher affirmation
of our own being, the higher seeking of ourselves which is identical
with the love of God, must therefore be regarded as nothing distinct
in kind from that first seeking of our natural self which in Spinoza's
view belongs to us in common with the animals, and indeed in common
with all beings whatever. It must be regarded merely as a direct
development and extension of the same thing. The main interest of the
Spinozistic ethics therefore lies in observing by what steps he
accomplishes this transition, while excluding altogether the idea of a
real division of the higher and the lower life, the spirit and flesh,
and of a conflict in which the former is developed through the
sacrifice of the latter.
Finite creatures exist only as modes of the divine substance, only so
far as they partake in the infinite, or what is the same thing with
Spinoza, in the purely affirmative or self-affirming nature of God.
They therefore must also be self-affirming. They can never limit
themselves; their limit lies in this, that they are not identified
with the infinite substance which expresses itself also in other
modes. In other words, the limit of any finite creature, that which
makes it finite, lies without it, and its own existence, so far as it
goes, must be pure self-assertion and self-seeking. "Unaquaeque res
quantum in se est in suo esse perseverare conatur," and this _conatus_
is its very essence or inmost nature.[49] In the animals this
_conatus_ takes the form of appetite, in man of desire, which is
"appetite with the consciousness of it."[50] But this constitutes no
essential difference between appetite and desire, for "whether a man
be conscious of his appetite or no, the appetite remains one and the
same thing."[51] Man therefore, like the animals, is purely
self-asserting and self-seeking. He can neither know nor will anything
but his own being, or if he knows or wills anything else, it must be
something involved in his own being. If he knows other beings, or
seeks their good, it must be because their existence and their good
are involved in his own. If he loves and knows God it must be because
he cannot know himself without knowing God, or find his supreme good
anywhere but in God.
What at first makes the language difficult to us is the identification
of will and intelligence. Both are represented as affirming their
objects. Descartes had prepared the way for this when he treated the
will as the faculty of judging or giving assent to certain
combinations of ideas, and distinguished it from the purely
intellectual faculties by which the ideas are apprehended. By this
distinction he had, as he supposed, secured a place for human freedom.
Admitting that intelligence is under a law of necessity, he claimed
for the Will a certain latitude or liberty of indifference, a power of
giving or withholding assent in all cases where the relations of ideas
were not absolutely clear and distinct. Spinoza points out that there
is no ground for such a distinction, that the acts of apprehension and
judgment cannot be separated from each other. "In the mind there is no
volition, i.e. no affirmation or negation which is not immediately
involved in the idea it apprehends," and therefore "intellect and will
are one and the same thing."[52] If, then, there is no freedom except
the liberty of indifference, freedom is impossible. Man, like all
other beings and things, is under an absolute law of necessity. All
the actions of his will, as well as of his intelligence, are but
different forms of the self-assertive tendency to which he cannot but
yield, because it is one with his very being, or only ideally
distinguishable therefrom. There is, however, another idea of liberty.
Liberty as the opposite of necessity is an absurdity--it is impossible
for either God or man; but liberty as the opposite of slavery is
possible, and it is actually possessed by God. The divine liberty
consists in this, that God acts from the necessity of his own nature
alone, and is not in any way determined from without. And the great
question of ethics is, How far can man partake in this liberty? At
first it would seem impossible that he should partake in it. He is a
finite being, whose power is infinitely surpassed by the power of
other beings to which he is related. His body acts only as it is acted
on, and his mind cannot therefore apprehend his body, except as
affected by other things. His self-assertion and self-seeking are
therefore confused with the asserting and seeking of other things, and
are never pure. His thought and activity cannot be understood except
through the influence of other things which lie outside of his
consciousness, and upon which his will has no influence. He cannot
know clearly and distinctly either himself or anything else; how then
can he know his own good or determine himself by the idea of it?
The answer is the answer of Descartes, that the apprehension of any
finite thing involves the adequate idea of the infinite and eternal
nature of God.[53] This is the primary object of intelligence, in
which alone is grounded the possibility of knowing either ourselves or
anything else. In so far as our knowledge is determined by this idea,
or by the ideas of other things, which are referred to this idea and
seen in its light, in so far its action flows from an internal and not
an external necessity. In so far, on the other hand, as we are
determined by the affections of the body, ideas in which the nature of
our own body and the nature of other things are confused together, in
so far we are determined by an external necessity. Or to put the same
thing in what has been shown to be merely another way of expression,
in so far as we are determined by pure intelligence we are free, but
in so far as we are determined by opinion and imagination we are
slaves.
From these premises it is easy to see what form the opposition of
reason and passion must necessarily take with Spinoza. The passions
belong to our nature as finite; they are grounded on, or rather are
but another form of inadequate ideas; but we are free only in so far
as our ideas either immediately are, or can be made, adequate. Our
idea of God is adequate _ex vi termini_; our ideas of the affections
of our body are inadequate, but can be made adequate in so far as they
are referred to the idea of God. And as the idea of God is purely
affirmative, this reference to the idea of God implies the elimination
of the negative element from the ideas of the affections of the body,
"for nothing that is positive in a false idea is removed by the
presence of truth as such."[54] Brought into contact with the idea of
God, all ideas become true and adequate, by the removal of the
negative or false element in them. The idea of God is, as it were, the
touchstone which distinguishes the gold from the dross. It enables us
to detect the higher spiritual element in the natural passions, and to
sever the element belonging to that pure love of self which is
identical with the love of perfection from the elements belonging to
that impure love of our own finite individuality as such which is
identical with the love of evil.
Implicit difficulties.
The imperfection in Spinoza's development of this principle has
already been indicated. It is in fact the same imperfection which runs
through his whole system. Just as he supposed that the ideas of finite
things were at once made consistent with the idea of the infinite when
he had named them modes, so here his conception of the change through
which selfish natural desire must pass in order to become spiritual is
far too superficial and external. Hence he has no sympathy with
asceticism, but treats it, like Bentham, as a _torva el tristis
superstitio_. Joy is the "transition from less to greater perfection,"
and cannot be but good; pain is the "transition from greater to less
perfection," and cannot be but evil. The revolt against the medieval
opposition of the nature and spirit is visible in many of his sayings.
"No Deity who is not envious can delight in my weakness or hurts, or
can regard as virtues those fears and sighs and tears which are the
signs of the mind's weakness; but contrariwise, the greater is our
joy, the greater is our progress to perfection, and our participation
in the divine nature."[55] "A free man thinks of nothing less than
death, his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life."[56] The
same idea, combining with the idea of necessity, leads him to condemn
repentance and pity, as well as pride and humility. Unconsciously,
Spinoza reproduces the principle of asceticism, while in words he
utterly rejects it. For though he tells us that pure self-complacency
is the highest thing we can hope, yet from this self-complacency all
regard to the finite individuality of the subject is eliminated. "Qui
Deum amat, conari non potest ut Deus ipsum contra amet." In like
manner, he absolutely condemns all hatred, envy, rivalry and ambition,
as springing out of an over-estimate of those finite things which one
only can possess, while the highest good is that which is enjoyed the
more easily and fully the greater the number of participants. Yet
Spinoza's exaltation of the social life, and of the love that binds it
together, is too like the Buddhist's universal charity that embraces
all creatures, and all creatures equally. Both are based on an
abstraction from all that is individual, only the Buddhist's
abstraction goes a step further, and erases even the distinction
between man and the animals. Spinoza felt the pressure of this
all-levelling logic when he said, "I confess I cannot understand how
spirits express God more than the other creatures, for I know that
between the finite and the infinite there is no proportion, and that
the distinction between God and the most excellent of created things
differs not a whit from the distinction between him and the lowest and
meanest of them."[57] As Pope said, God is "as full and perfect in a
hair as a heart"; in all finite things there is a ray of divinity, and
in nothing more than a ray. Yet in another epistle Spinoza contradicts
this view, and declares that, while he does not consider it necessary
to "know Christ after the flesh, he does think it is necessary to know
the eternal Son of God, i.e. God's eternal wisdom, which is manifested
in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in
Christ Jesus."[58] In the _Ethics_ the distinction of man and the
animals is treated as an absolute distinction, and it is asserted with
doubtful consistency that the human soul cannot all be destroyed along
with the body, for that there is something of it which is eternal. Yet
from this eternity we must, of course, eliminate all notion of the
consciousness of the finite self as such. At this point, in short, the
two opposite streams of Spinoza's thought, the positive method he
_intends_ to pursue, and the negative or abstracting method he really
_does_ pursue, meet in irreconcilable contradiction. The finite must
be related to the infinite so as to preserve all that is in it of
reality; and therefore its limit or the negative element in it must be
abstracted from. But it turns out that, with this abstraction from a
negative element involved in the existence of the finite, the positive
also disappears, and God is all in all in a sense that absolutely
excludes the existence of the finite. "The mind's intellectual love of
God," says Spinoza, "is the very love wherewith God loves himself, not
in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be expressed by
the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity;
i.e. the mind's intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love
wherewith God loves himself."[59] This double "in so far," which
returns so frequently in Spinoza, just conceals for a moment the
contradiction of two streams of thought, one of which must be
swallowed up by the other, if they are once allowed to meet.
General importance of the Cartesian school.
We have now reviewed the main points of the system, which was the
ultimate result of the principles of Descartes. The importance of this
first movement of modern philosophy lies in its assertion and exhibition
of the unity of the intelligible world with itself and with the mind of
man. In this point of view, it was the philosophical counterpart of
Protestantism; but, like Protestantism in its earliest phase, it passed
rapidly from the doctrine that God is, without priest or authority,
present to man's spirit, to the doctrine that man's spirit is as nothing
before God. The object was too powerful for the subject, who effaced
himself before God that he might be strong towards men. But in this
natural movement of feeling and thought it was forgotten that God who
effaced the world and the finite spirit by his presence could not be a
living God. Spinoza gives the ultimate expression to this tendency, and
at the same time marks its limit, when he says that whatever reality is
in the finite is of the infinite. But he is unsuccessful in showing
that, on the principles on which he starts, there can be any reality in
the finite at all. Yet even if the finite be an illusion, still more if
it be better than an illusion, it requires to be accounted for. Spinoza
accounts for it neither as illusory nor as real. It was reserved for the
following generation of philosophers to assert, in different ways, the
reality of the finite, the value of experience and the futility of
abstractions. Spinoza had declared that true knowledge consists in
seeing things under the form of eternity, but it is impossible that
things can be seen under the form of eternity unless they have been
first seen under the form of time. The one-sided assertion of
individuality and difference in the schools of Locke and Leibnitz was
the natural complement of the one-sided assertion of universality and
unity in the Cartesian school. But when the individualistic tendency of
the 18th century had exhausted itself, and produced its own refutation
in the works of Kant, it was inevitable that the minds of men should
again turn to the great philosopher, who, with almost perfect insight
working through imperfect logic, first formulated the idea of a unity
presupposed in and transcending the difference of matter and mind,
subject and object.
See the Histories of Philosophy, especially those by Hegel, Feuerbach,
Erdmann and Fischer; F. Bouillier, _Histoire de la philosophie
cartesienne_ (1854); Olle-Laprune, _Philosophie de Malebranche_; E.
Saisset, _Precurseurs et disciples de Descartes_ (1862). The German
treatises on Spinoza are too numerous to mention. Jacobi's _Letters on
Spinoza_, which were the beginning of a true interpretation of his
philosophy, are still worth reading. We may also mention C.
Schaarschmidt, _Descartes und Spinoza_ (1850); C. Sigwart, _Spinozas
neuentdeckter Tractat von Gott, dem Menschen, und dessen
Gluckseligkeit_ (1866). Both these writers have published German
translations of the _Tractatus de Deo. _See also Trendelenburg,
_Historische Beitrage zur Philosophie_ (1867); R. Avenarius, _Uber die
beiden ersten Phasen des spinozischen Pantheismus_ (1868); M. Joel,
_Zur Genesis der Lehre Spinozas_ (1871); R. Willis, _Benedict de
Spinoza: his Ethics, Life and Influence on Modern Religious Thought_
(1870); F. Pollock, _Spinoza, his Life and Philosophy_ (1880); J.
Martineau, _Types of Ethical Theory_ (1885); J. Caird, _Spinoza_ (in
Blackwood's Philosophical Series); H.H. Joachim, _A Study of the
Ethics of Spinoza_ (1901); R. Adamson, _The Development of Modern
Philosophy_ (1903); also articles DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, and SPINOZA.
(E. C.)