Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate
Lineamenta Alque Annotationes ad Traclatum Theologico
Politicum. Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halae
ad Salam. J. F. Lippert. 1852.
This little volume is one evidence among many of the
interest which continues to be felt by the German
students in Spinoza. The actual merit of the book
itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry
with which they are gleaning among the libraries of
Holland for any traces of him which they can recover;
and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring
that factitious importance which attaches to the
most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness.
Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but
we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed.
Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will much
illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the
better part of his life in working the language in which
he expressed it clear of ambiguities; and such earlier
draughts of his system as are supposed still to be extant
in MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes
himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity
to what is in no need of additional difficulty. Of
Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it
must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be
extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence,
we know only enough to feel how vast a
chasm remains to be filled. It is not often that any
man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as
Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events
connected with it; but because (and no sympathy with
his peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his
merit) he was one of the very best men whom these
modern times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited,
and thrown upon the world when a mere boy
to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements
which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward
in the world; refusing pensions, legacies, money
in many forms, he maintained himself with grinding
glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had
been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the
best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which
was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with
which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the
endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to
his executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza
of "blessed memory."
The account which remains of him we owe not to
an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman, to whom his
theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that
the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a
blemish in his character,--that except so far as his opinions
were blameable, he had lived to all outward appearances free
from fault. We desire, in what we are going to say of him,
to avoid offensive collision with even popular prejudices,
and still more with the earnest convictions
of serious persons: our business is to relate
what he was, and leave others to form their own conclusions.
But one lesson there does seem to lie in such
a life of such a man,--a lesson deeper than any which is
to be found in his philosophy,--that wherever there is
genuine and thorough love for good and goodness, no
speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant
as to forfeit those graces which are promised
not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart. In
Spinoza's own beautiful language,--"justitia et caritas
unicum et certissimum verae fidei Catholicae signurn est,
et veri Spiritus sancti fructus: et ubicumque haec reperiuntur,
ibi Christus re verg est, et ubicumque haec
desunt deest Christus. Solo namque Christi Spiritu duci
possumus in amorem justitiae et caritatis." We may
deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of
thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we
cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of
all sincere and honourable men. We will say, indeed,
as much as this, that wherever and on whatever
questions good men are found ranged on opposite sides,
one of three alternatives is always true:--either that
the points of disagreement are purely speculative and
of no moral importance, or that there is a misunderstanding
of language, and the same thing is meant
under difference of words, or else that the real truth is
something different from what is held by any of the
disputants, and that each is representing some important
element which the other ignores or forgets. In either
case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary,
if we would understand what we disagree with, or would
oppose it with success. Spinoza's influence over European
thought is too great to be denied or set aside, and
if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we
cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no
one now living will deny in words, and which a century
or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effects
upon the popular judgment.
Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are
able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy
in the first and only logical form which as yet it has
assumed. Whatever may have been the case with his
disciples, in the author of this system there was no
unwillingness to look closely at it, or follow it out
to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits
belong to Spinoza, at least he has done as
much as with language can be done to make himself
thoroughly understood--a merit in which it cannot be
said that his followers have imitated him--Pantheism,
as it is known in England, being a very synonym of
vagueness and mysticism.
The fact is, that both in friend and enemy alike,
there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really
was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little
disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox
Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist
--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would
have had something reasonable to say, could find no
better name for him than a Colt trunkner Mann--a
God intoxicated man; an expression which has been
quoted by everybody who has since written upon the
subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those
laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due
allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a
Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can
it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who
carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years,
deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last
to the world in a form more severe than with such
subjects had ever been so much as attempted? With
him, as with all great men, there was no effort after
sublime emotions. A plain, practical person, his object
in philosophy was only to find a rule on which he
could depend to govern his own actions and his
own judgment: and his treatises contain no more
than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely
personal search, and the grounds on which he rested
them.
We cannot do better than follow his own account of
himself as he has given it in the opening of his
unfinished Tract, "De Emendatione Intellectas." His
language is very beautiful, but elaborate and full; and,
as we have a long journey before us, we must be
content to epitomize it.
Looking round him on his entrance into life, and
asking himself what was his place and business in it,
he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found
little that he could venture to imitate. Whatever they
professed, they all really guided themselves by their
different notions of what they thought desirable; and
these notions themselves resting on no more secure
foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience, the
experience of one not being the experience of another,
men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with
life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably
failing. Their mistakes arising, as it seemed to Spinoza,
from inadequate knowledge, things which at one time
looked desirable disappointing expectation when obtained,
and the wiser course concealing itself often
under an uninviting exterior, he desired to substitute
certainty for conjecture, and endeavour to find, by
some surer method, where the real good of man lay.
All this may sound very Pagan, and perhaps it is so.
We must remember that he had been brought up a
Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion;
his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of
life, with no creed or system lying between them and
himself as the interpreter of it. Some true account of
things, however, he thought it likely that there must
be, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms
of human thought, but one, he reflected, would admit
of the certainty which he required--the mathematical;
and, therefore, if certain knowledge were attainable at
all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or
demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly
conceived the consequences which were formally involved
in them. The question was, therefore, of these
ideas, these verae ideae, as he calls them,--what were they,
and how were they to be obtained: if they were to
serve as the axioms of his system, they must, he felt,
be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required;
and the illustration which he gives of the character of
such ideas is ingenious and Platonic.
In order to produce any mechanical instrument, he
says, we require others with which to manufacture it;
and others again to manufacture those; and it would
seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature,
however, has provided for the difficulty in creating of
her own accord certain rude instruments, with the help
of which we can make others better; and others again
with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be
with the mind, and there must be somewhere similar
original instruments provided also as the first outfit of
intellectual enterprise. To discover them, he examines
the various senses in which men are said to know
anything, and he finds that these senses resolve themselves
into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four:--
We know a thing,
1.
i. Ex mero auditu: because we have heard it from some
person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to question.
ii. Ab experientia vaga: from general experience: for instance,
all facts or phenomena which come to us through our senses as
phenomena, but of the causes of which we are ignorant.