This, the most wonderful of all philosophers, the most daring, the most
scientific, was born, a little Jew of Portuguese descent, in Amsterdam on
November 28th, 1632, at a time when the European world was riven by the
fiercest sectarian contention; when the hounds of the Spanish Inquisition
were baying hell-fire and destruction to any man who should dare to
differ from the dogmas of the pope as to objective truth. He grew up to
be a typical Oriental—like Jesus Himself—with all the Oriental powers of
mysticism.
Desirous of completing his knowledge of Latin, he took lessons from a
certain doctor of medicine, one Van den Ende, who eked out his income by
taking pupils. Whether the worthy Van den Ende employed his spare time
by inoculating Spinoza with what Hume afterwards called his “hideous
atheistical doctrines” is not apparently known; but it seems certain
that Spinoza thus early came under the influence of that series of ideas
which so many people have complained of as “medical materialism,”
whatever that may mean. Ignorant people have, from the very earliest
times, complained that doctors have no religion; that we only look upon
the materialist side of man; that we are blind to ethical truth and to
the eternal verities of Plato. This, of course, is sheer nonsense. It
is quite true that few, if any, doctors have been burned at the stake
for a point of belief; but that is simply because the medical profession
has always preferred, if burning were in the question, to be burned
for something that could be proved objectively, such as the difference
between scarlet fever and cancer, for instance, and not because of
an opinion that apparently depends upon a state of mind or upon the
education that any given man has received, or upon the surroundings in
which he grew up.
It is said that Van den Ende had a daughter with whom Spinoza fell in
love; but the critics have cast so many doubts upon the pretty romance
that has been woven between them that nowadays it is not generally
believed. Some rash words of Spinoza’s having come to the ears of
the authorities of the synagogue, they summoned him before them to
explain; but, seeing that he had already parted in very truth from the
conventional Hebrew worship, and not wishing to have any public scandal
among the community, the Chief Rabbi offered him a pension of 1,000
florins if he would outwardly conform and appear occasionally in the
synagogue; that is to say, if Spinoza would turn hypocrite. But this
was not at all in accordance with Spinoza’s character, so, since he
refused to be coerced, it became necessary to excommunicate him from the
synagogue after an unavailing attempt had been made by some footpad to
assassinate him. Spinoza drew up a protest against his excommunication,
but did not publish it. He dropped the name of Baruch and took the name
of Benedict; in this possibly there may have been a shimmer of irony at
his excommunication, for both names mean “blessed.” Such irony would
be in accordance with what one might expect from a pupil of Van den
Ende, who in truth seems to have been an ironical man. Later, he fell
into trouble with the French authorities in Paris, and was hanged for a
conspirator. Van den Ende seems to have been a very undoctor-like sort of
doctor, for it is seldom indeed that any of our profession conspire with
anybody; least of all for a religious or political purpose. Marat, of
course, was a brilliant exception, but he came to an untimely end.
Expelled from the Hebrew Church, and with the Inquisition waiting
open-mouthed to burn him if it had the chance, Spinoza spent the rest
of his short life in little towns of Holland, keeping himself alive by
grinding spectacles. The tubercle bacillus was already beginning to eat
away his lungs, and men howled at him as an atheist whenever he went into
the street. But already he had many admirers. A man named De Fries left
him a small fortune which Spinoza refused, saying that the man’s brother
and rightful heir had more need of it than he. The brother accepted it
on the sole condition that Spinoza should take sufficient money to keep
him alive. Even of this, which was offered on the assumption that Spinoza
would need 500 florins, he would only accept 300 florins annually, and
gave the rest to the poor.
During the five years following his excommunication Spinoza worked hard
at his philosophical speculations, and at his lens-grinding, attaining
a great reputation for thoroughness in his work. A little society
of doctors and medical students was formed to study the Cartesian
philosophy, and by sheer learning, daring of speculation, and elevation
of moral character, the little Hebrew became the leader; and thus began
the extraordinary admiration for the philosophy of Spinoza which has
always distinguished biological scientists.
Spinoza attained eminence in many ways before the end came. His landlady,
a Madame van den Spyek, came to him in a religious difficulty. She knew
that Spinoza was good and learned, though people _did_ call him an
atheist, and went saying what a sorry time he would have of it when the
Inquisition got hold of him. Yet she heard so much about the different
sects, which were struggling so fiercely all over Europe. What was she,
a decent and pious woman who worshipped God after the manner of her
fathers, to believe? She would ask the gentle and learned atheist; so she
went diffidently to him and opened her heart to him. Thus spake Spinoza:
“Your religion is a good religion, madame; you have no need to seek after
another, and neither need you doubt of your eternal welfare so long as,
with due pious observances, you continue to live a life of peace and
charity with all.”
Just so might have spoken T. H. Huxley two hundred years later; just so
might have spoken Plato two thousand years earlier; so assuredly would
not have spoken Bishop Tertullian, who said, two hundred years after the
crucifixion of a loving and forgiving Jesus, “Credo quia impossibile,”
and rejoiced to think that those who differed from him in opinions were
safely frizzling in hell.
Spinoza, in his strenuous devotion to scientific truth, knowing nothing
about the tiny rod-shaped bacillus that was growing in his lungs, led a
most unhealthy life. Sometimes for three months together his footsteps
would not cross the lintel; he lived a life of asceticism worthy of
Nietzsche himself, or of a monk of the Thebaid, though for a very
different reason. Eating just enough to keep him alive and no more,
cheerful and merry with his friends, averse from all political and
religious contention, he was proud of only one thing—his self-control.
People said that he used to be vastly amused by setting two spiders to
fight one another. Of course this story really represents Spinoza’s
interest in the weird marriage rights of the Arachnidæ. These are really
extraordinarily interesting, and many a thoughtful man has followed them,
with the aid of an electric torch, in the dusk of the evening when the
sexes conjoin. The female is considerably larger and more powerful than
the male; and she sits quietly waiting with a naughty gleam in her bright
eyes, at the centre of the web. He, insignificant despicable wretch,
dances timidly towards her, two of his paws held out with the caution
of a professional pugilist. They meet, he continuing his excessive
caution. Then a moment of love, an almost imperceptible caress, and he
flees literally for his life with hell at his heels. Should the dutiful
wife catch him, woe worth the day for the husband. The wicked creature,
having sated her sinful lust, devours him, claw, spinnerets and all.
Marriage from the point of view of a spider must be an exciting business.
I do not know what are the odds on the escape of the male; but doubtless
Spinoza worked them out from his own observations. Personally I should
fancy that the male has about an even chance. I have often watched
among the mosquitoes only to find after an hour that the male could not
approach at all, dare he never so wisely. But I have seen horrid orgies
of cannibalism should the husband be a shade too slow. It is feminism _in
excelsis_; she, great, big, hulking brute that she is, cannibalistically
eats her dear little mate with his slender and spiderly grace. And likes
to do it, too. Fabre thought that it was a sort of religious rite among
the Arachnidæ; but let us think better of the race of spiders than that.
I have no doubt whatever that it was while Spinoza was watching the
spiders at their cannibalistic love-making that the amazing spectacle of
the presence of so much cruelty in Nature thrust itself before his mind,
and led him to speculate why he, too, a man so good and virtuous, who
had never harmed a single living creature in his life, should yet be so
ill and coughing and sweating and spitting and falling away to a shadow.
It was then probably that he evolved his stately system of pantheism
that has so impressed the scientific world. Why should the performance
of a purely natural function, one which God has implanted in the spiders
that they might propagate their species, be attended with such savagery?
This story about Spinoza is told by Dr. Colerus, the Lutheran divine
who afterwards became his biographer. Naturally Colerus misunderstood
Spinoza’s scientific enthusiasm, and equally naturally Spinoza, being
accused of atheism, was also accused of cruelty as monstrous as that of
Domitian in his most palmy days. An atheist in the seventeenth century
was known to be capable of all.
There is really little more to tell about the short life of Spinoza.
He was offered a post at the University of Heidelberg as professor of
philosophy, but politely declined on the score of his health. Probably
he did so really because he did not care to set himself in a position
where a turn of the wheel of war might put him at the mercy of the
hounds of the Inquisition, with their burnings and tortures and _auto da
fe’s_ and religious wars. The real call to join his spirit with that of
the Immanent God came when he was forty-two years old in 1674. However
deeply a man may speculate upon “God, Man, and his well-being”—to name
only one of his works—the tubercle bacillus takes no heed of motives,
and will ever be ready to attack him if he denies himself food and fresh
air. Thus it was that his friends of The Hague went quietly to church one
afternoon, doubtless thinking nothing of the troublesome cough from which
he had suffered for so long; and that when they returned they did not
hear his cheerful voice, for he was lying dead at his spectacle grinding.
He had a short life; we can sum it up in a few words: Spinoza was a good
man and he died poor. When they came to look into his effects they found
nothing but a very little money, just enough to satisfy his creditors;
the tools of his trade and a few lenses, which were afterwards sold as
being of great intrinsic value because he had ground them so well.
It was many years before the real worth of the little Hebrew began to
dawn upon the world; and then it was not the doctors nor the scientific
men to whom it appealed but the poets, for like all true poets he was a
mystic. During the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution began
to free men’s minds, he was looked upon as an atheist, and even the
good-natured Hume, possibly ironically, spoke of his hideous atheistical
doctrine. But the poets, in the ecstasy of joy that accompanied the
liberation of mankind, saw far otherwise. Goethe begun to understand
him, and Novalis, the German hymn-writer, spoke famously of him as a
“God-intoxicated man”; a man drunk with the intellectual love of God.
Indeed, the very word “love” is too carnal a term to apply to Spinoza’s
philosophy. It was probably some such feeling that led people to hesitate
deeply before changing the ancient terms “Faith, Hope, and Charity” into
“Faith, Hope, and Love,” although Spinoza in his mysticism, and our
modern mystic, Professor Freud,[27] would have approved it.
After Novalis came Coleridge and Wordsworth; and thenceforward Spinoza’s
fame began rapidly to extend, until it has influenced the whole of
modern thought. Benjamin Jowett, in one of his biological sermons
delivered in Edinburgh, the home of Calvinism, spoke of him as one of the
best men who ever lived, and compared his life to that of John Bunyan,
sorrowfully admitting that the tinker would probably have burnt the
spectacle-grinder if they could have met.
Like Jowett, Dean Inge also has been touched by the wonder of Baruch the
Jew. “Beatitudo non est premium virtutis, sed ipsa virtus,” said Spinoza.
“Heaven,” repeats Dean Inge, “is not the _reward_ of virtue; it is virtue
itself.” And again speaking of Spinoza, he says, “No thoroughgoing
rationalist philosophy can explain the working of a mind in love.”
Accepting as proved that Spinoza’s philosophy has enormously influenced
the modern world, let us consider what it really is. Spinoza’s pantheism
does not consist, as so many amiable spiritualists seem to think, of
a kindly God of mystic light, surrounded by a fluttering crowd of
disembodied spirits with a general atmosphere of worship throughout the
universe. It is a highly mystical and rather stern philosophy which leads
to surprising results and best explains the known facts of life. God is
infinite, with attributes of extension and thought; therefore He must
embrace all good and all evil. As He is infinite He must be coterminous
with the universe in which there can be nothing else but God. In fact,
God is reality. God is the universe. Christ, in Spinoza’s view, is a
mystical conception Who includes all the gentleness, all the wisdom,
all the loving-kindness, of the world. He is the method by which God
communicated His will to man. Putting it briefly, Spinoza was a complete
monist, who made no distinction whatever between spirit and matter.
The further we extend scientific inquiry the more we confirm Spinoza’s
views of the universe. Nebulæ have been discovered whose light takes a
million years to reach the earth; so also did Spinoza account for the
existence of evil in the world, that it could only exist because God
allowed it, and as we cannot understand why God should allow it, the
natural corollary must be that it is a part of Himself. As his fellow-Jew
Heine said: “All our modern philosophers, perhaps unconsciously to
themselves, see through the glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”
Spinoza began the revolt against the orthodox conception of a fall
from virtue on the part of man; and he was strongly supported by the
doctrine of evolution which was the greatest contribution of the
nineteenth century to thought. One would have thought that there could
be no single educated man in the world to-day who does not firmly
believe that man has ascended from an ape-like animal, for one has only
to stroll around any decent museum to see the irrefragable proofs in
the skulls and prehistoric remains of man who lived far beyond recorded
time, long before man had learned to speak or to act with his fellow-man
in societies. Yet to this day some obscurantists try to prohibit the
teaching of natural selection; as if it mattered! In spite of them
natural selection will go on triumphant, however the wilfully blind may
rage. But we have passed beyond the stage of natural selection so far as
man is concerned. We now live in the age of intellect, the psychozoic
age. The little naked, helpless creature that had so stern a fight for
existence against the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros has developed a
brain such as never was in the world before, and that brain is beginning
to take a hand in nature’s game. Evolution is proceeding, not by tooth
and claw, not by ravening and bloodshed, but by the discoveries of such
men as Luther Burbank, who has revolutionised horticulture; of Henry
Ford, who has revolutionised transport; and of our own Australian
Farrar, who, by revolutionising wheat-growing, has made it possible for
two blades of wheat to grow where one grew before. In the world of ideas
evolution is proceeding by the thoughts of such men as Darwin, Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer and thousands of young biologists. The brain of man will
work towards perfection possibly by birth control, sterilisation of the
unfit, and beyond all by the elimination of syphilis.
The process of evolution towards righteousness was interrupted for five
sad years by the World War, which was due to a stupid misunderstanding of
that very doctrine of evolution to which Spinoza’s philosophy had pointed
the way. But pantheism must be looked upon, not as a religion, but as a
scientific philosophy. As a religion it does not satisfy the heart of man.
Eternity, according to Spinoza, is not merely a long time: it is really
a mode of thought, and cannot be reduced to measurements of time. That
is strangely like what one hears from countless pulpits to-day, if the
occupants thereof have opened their ears to modern thought. We are
living in eternity to-day, and should act as if our actions were to be
eternal. Still speaking mystically, heaven is to be a good man; hell is
to be a bad man. There can be nothing worse even if we do know what is
happening to us after death. And no better man ever lived upon the earth
than the despised little Jew, Spinoza. Except for fear of being accused
of perpetrating an epigram upon a most solemn subject, I might say that
it is better to be God-intoxicated with Spinoza than priest-intoxicated
with the various unphysiological Christian creeds. T. H. Huxley, who was
accused of all sorts of nonsense, recognised that it was necessary to
create an ideal Jesus for man, because, as the critics have shown, owing
to the intervention of very imperfect men, we do not really know what
were His real teachings; still, we must make an ideal for ourselves;
and for every man his own religion must lie between himself and his
God, or it is no religion. But so long as it leads to tolerance, mercy,
loving-kindness, and duty, he cannot go far wrong. All these things were
taught by Spinoza, and, so far as we know, by Jesus Christ.
But possibly the recent discovery of the unconscious mind may have cast a
doubt even upon the stately pantheism of Spinoza. Possibly what he took
to be the attributes of God are in reality purely human conceptions.
Possibly animals, being so much more under the influence of the
unconscious mind than men are, do not feel as we do, and there may not
be so much cruelty in the world as we suppose. We know that in men the
unconscious mind was the first to be evolved, and certainly it is the
last to die.[28] To that extent at least may we give thanks to God, and
as George Santayana says in his essay on Spinoza to all the little men
who have sneered at Spinoza: “I do not believe you; God is great.”
But if Spinoza was the greatest of philosophers we must also remember
that he was one of the first, if not the very first, of the critics
of the Bible who endeavoured to see that wonderful book through clear
glasses, through spectacles that were properly ground, because he had
ground them himself. He had not the advantage of modern physiology and
psychology, whereby we know that a book, written by men in a state of
semi-savagery, such as Moses and the other supposed authors of the
Pentateuch, must reflect their semi-savage minds and the thickened
cerebral arteries which must have been theirs if they were so old as
tradition states. None the less he came to very much the same conclusions
as have been reached by the most learned and scientific of modern
commentators. As the doctrine of evolution has cast a doubt amounting
to certainty upon the story of creation, so Spinoza, by reason of his
intellectual love of God, has cast a doubt upon the theory of a personal
God, of an all-wise and all-loving Father. The existence of evil in the
world, so ever-present, so clamant, so insistent, by itself disproves the
existence of such a personality. Where was the fatherly God of the deists
when the late war broke out? Perchance he slept or was gone on a journey.
Such an absentee God is no God for modern man. By recognising that evil,
if, and so far as it exists, must be part of God himself, Spinoza fell
in absolutely with modern thought, only he lived three hundred years too
soon. But the discovery, or hypothesis, of the unconscious mind, has had
still more startling effects upon philosophy; for who can now say that
he is not unconsciously listening to the voice of his grandmother when
he is formulating his most earnest conclusions? Those sanguine persons,
mostly politicians who state proudly that they are satisfied to remain
undisturbed with the beliefs that they have learned at their mother’s
knee, are probably unconsciously retailing the beliefs that she in her
turn learned from her mother, and she from hers. Beliefs acquired in
very early youth remain till the end of life as if they were divine;
Gibbon has shown the debt that the early Church owed to women, who were
doubtless the contemporary mothers and grandmothers and had the maternal
mind; dear, amiable, credulous, superstitious creatures they were, though
perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. Undoubtedly these women were not persons
of critical and scientific mind, though to every one of their sons and
grandsons they must have seemed to speak with awful “respectability,”
just as old ladies do to this very day. It has been very well said that
whenever one feels a conviction of absolute certainty approximating to
the divine, one is probably listening to the still small voice of the
“herd” speaking through one’s unconscious memory; and common experience
is that the herd generally speaks most emphatically through the dulcet
tones of that dear old lady, that real transmitter of the herd ideas of
past generations, the grandmother. _She_, not Spinoza, nor Nietzsche,
nor Darwin, nor Schopenhauer, has been the real maker of thought to the
present day.
Let Spinoza and Nietzsche go hang as abominations unto the Lord, atheists
and capable of the utmost wickedness—but _not_ of sectarian wars and
wholesale tortures and burnings. And as for Voltaire—one simply shudders
at his ribaldry and irrepressible mockery of so-called religion which
caused savage persecution in the name of the best and most merciful of
men—Jesus Christ. To that extent at least _l’infame_ has passed away,
largely owing to Voltaire, though personally he could not have been a
very nice man if all tales are true. But certain sects are still willing
to apply another form of torture than thumbscrew, rack and stake to those
who dare to differ in opinion from their grandmothers.
I see that I have omitted the most mystical of Spinoza’s conceptions.
God, besides having the attributes mentioned, has infinite substance.
That was really why they turned him out of the synagogue, and would
have liked to burn him if they could. The idea of giving a body to
God whom St. John defined as an emotion! God is _Love_! Nowadays the
identification of matter with electricity and the modern conception of
the ether is the nearest that science can reach to Spinoza’s dreamings,
but that in no way detracts from his extraordinary insight into the
universe. Even taking Spinozism in its most material aspect, we find
that the more we extend the bounds of the known universe the greater
it becomes, until infinity seems to become rather more than a mere
mathematical conception denoted by a mathematical symbol.
What we gain from Spinoza then—and the best of men, the best of the
clergy, agree—is that eternity is a state of mind; that is to say, it is
a purely human conception. Perhaps if we go further and say that good and
evil, instead of being attributes of the infinite God, are also purely
human conceptions, we shall come still nearer to absolute truth.
But quite clearly the notion of God as an all-wise and all-loving Father
is inconsistent with medical experience. The only decent thing nature has
done for man is to give us our unconscious minds, without which we should
be stunned and maddened by the intolerable thunder of our hearts, the
rushing through our arteries, the incessant dripping of our kidneys and
even more uncomely internal parts. And the way nature has treated woman
is still more shocking. Any earthly father who treated his children as
nature has treated woman would be considered rather as a stepfather.
Nowadays Spinoza’s pantheism suggests to scientific men the mighty
forces that lie locked up within the atom.[29] So far as we know, the
universe, however vast it may be, is, in the last resource, composed of
atoms. But once again, and fifty times over, I would most strenuously say
that pantheism is a philosophy: it is _not_ a religion. It is too stern,
too scientific, too consistent with known facts, ever to attract the
countless bruised hearts, relics of the late war, longing for comfort in
their grief.
Even otherwise intelligent men often ask me whether the _Religio Medici_
of Sir Thomas Browne really represents the religion of modern doctors.
The nearest approach to a talk about religion I have ever heard from
a doctor was once when I heard one doctor say of another that he was
believed to pray for his patients; but in that I seem to scent a savour
of professional jealousy. Otherwise I might almost feel justified in
saying that _Religio Medici_ is generally considered by doctors to be
a farrago of quackery, mysticism, credulity, and astrology, put into
gorgeous and quite unnecessarily obscure language; full of sound and
fury; signifying nothing. Probably Browne was unconsciously remembering
the teachings of some old lady who had impressed the truth upon him in
his early infancy—probably with her slipper.
But I cannot close this essay upon the greatest of all philosophers
better than by repeating the words of Ernest Renan upon him when they
dedicated the great statue at The Hague in 1882: “Woe unto him who in
passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would
be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his own vulgarity, and
by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man from his granite
pedestal will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he had
found; and ages hence the cultivated traveller, passing by this spot,
will say in his heart, ‘The truest vision man ever had of God, came
perhaps, here.’”
Nor can one do better than follow Spinoza so far as earthly intelligence
can lead us. Those people whose hearts the war has left bruised and
broken are fortunate if they can still believe what they learned at
their mother’s knee. She, dear, simple, lovable soul, knew nothing about
the unconscious mind, nor physiology, nor historical criticism, nor
Spinoza and his majestic pantheism. All she knew was that her sons were
unhappy, and she must comfort them as best she could. Men have always
been unhappy, and women have always tried to comfort them according to
their sons’ needs. All good men have the same religion, and they have all
learned it at their mother’s knee.[30]
Of all the philosophers who have tried to solve the awful mystery of the
Infinite God, Baruch Spinoza probably came as near to it as He will ever
allow.
But man must work out his own salvation, and it is not right to blame
the infinite God if anything fails to happen as we desire. “Let us still
cultivate our garden.”