SPINOZA ON THE SOCIAL PROBLEM[82]
I
Hobbes
Passing from Bacon to Spinoza we meet with Thomas Hobbes, a man from
whom Spinoza drew many of his ideas, though very little of his
inspiration. The social incidence of the greater part of Hobbes’s
thinking has long been recognized; he is not a figure over whom the
biographer of social thought finds much cause to quarrel. He is at once
the materialist _par excellence_ of modern philosophy, and the most
uncompromising protagonist of the absolutist theory of the state. The
individual, all compact of pugnacity, was to Hobbes the bogey which the
state, voracious of all liberties, became two centuries later to Herbert
Spencer. He had in acute degree the philosopher’s natural appetite for
order; and trembled at the thought of initiatives not foreseen by his
political geometry. He lived in the midst of alarms: war stepped on the
heels of war in what was very nearly a real _bellum omnium contra
omnes_. He lived in the midst of political reaction: men were weary of
Renaissance exuberance and Reformation strife, and sank gladly into the
open arms of the past. There could be no end, thought Hobbes, to this
turmoil of conflicting egos, individual and national, until all groups
and individuals knelt in absolute obedience to one sovereign power.
But all this has been said before; we need but remind ourselves of it
here so that we may the better appreciate the vibrant sympathy for the
individual man, the generous defence of popular liberties, that fill
with the glow of subdued passion the pages of the gentle Spinoza.
II
The Spirit of Spinoza
Yet Spinoza was not wanting in that timidity and that fear of unbridled
instinct which stood dictator over the social philosophy of Hobbes. He
knew as well as Hobbes the dangers of a democracy that could not
discipline itself. “Those who have had experience of how changeful the
temper of the people is, are almost in despair. For the populace is
governed not by reason but by emotion; it is headlong in everything, and
easily corrupted by avarice and luxury.”[83] And even more than Hobbes
he withdrew from the affairs of men and sought in the protection of a
suburban attic the peace and solitude which were the vital medium of his
thought. He found that sometimes at least, “truth hath a quiet breast.”
“_Se tu sarai solo_,” wrote Leonardo, “_tu sarai tutto tuo_.” And surely
Goethe thought of Spinoza when he said: “No one can produce anything
important unless he isolate himself.”
But this dread of the crowd was only a part of Spinoza’s nature, and not
the dominant part. His fear of men was lost in his boundless capacity
for affection; he tried so hard to understand men that he could not help
but love them. “I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or
execrate, but to understand, human actions; and to this end I have
looked upon passions ... not as vices of human nature, but as properties
just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like
to the nature of the atmosphere.”[84] Even the accidents of time and
space were sinless to his view, and all the world found room in the
abundance of his heart. “Spinoza deified the All in order to find peace
in the face of it,” says Nietzsche:[85] but perhaps, too, because all
love is deification.
All in all, history shows no man more honest and independent; and the
history of philosophy shows no man so sincere, so far above quibbling
and dispute and the picking of petty flaws, so eager to receive the
truth even when brought by the enemy, so ready to forgive even
persecution in the depth and breadth of his tolerance. No man who
suffered so much injustice made so few complaints. He became great
because he could merge his own suffering in the suffering of all,--a
mark of all deep men. “They who have not suffered,” says Ibsen,--and,
one might add, suffered with those they saw suffer,--“never create; they
only write books.”
Spinoza did not write much; the long-suffering are seldom long-winded. A
fragment _On the Improvement of the Understanding_; a brief volume on
religion and the state; the _Ethics_; and as he began to write the
chapter on democracy in the _Political Treatise_ consumption conquered
him. Bacteria take no bribes.
III
Political Ethics
Had he lived longer it would have dawned perhaps even on the German
historians that Spinoza’s basic interest was not in metaphysics so much
as in political ethics. The _Ethics_, because it is the most sustained
flight of reasoning in philosophy, has gathered round it all the
associations that throng about the name of Spinoza, so that one is apt
to think of him in terms of a mystical “pantheism” rather than of
coördinative intelligence, democracy, and free thought.[86] Höffding
considers it a defect in Spinoza’s philosophy that it takes so little
notice of epistemology: but should we not be grateful for that? Here are
men suffering, said Spinoza, here are men enslaved by passions and
prelates and kings; surely till these things are dealt with we have no
time for epistemological delicacies. Instead of increasing the world’s
store of learned ignorance by writing tomes on the possibility of a
subject knowing an object, Spinoza thought it better to give himself to
the task of helping to keep alive in an age of tyrannical reaction the
Renaissance doctrine of popular sovereignty. Instead of puzzling himself
and others about epistemology he pondered the problem of stimulating the
growth of intelligence and evolving a rational ethic. He thought that
philosophy was something more than a chess-game for professors.
There is no need to spend time and space here on what for Spinoza, as
for Socrates and Plato, was the problem of problems,--how human reason
could be developed to a point where it might replace supernatural
sanctions for social conduct and provide the medium of social
reconstruction. One point, however, may be profitably emphasized.
A careless reading of the _Ethics_ may lead to the belief that Spinoza
bases his philosophy on a naïve opposition of reason to passion. It is
not so. “A desire cannot be restrained or removed,” says Spinoza,
“except by an opposite and stronger desire.”[87] Reason is not dictator
to desire, it is a relation among desires,--that relation which arises
when experience has hammered impulses into coördination. An impulse,
passion or emotion is by itself “a confused idea,” a blurred picture of
the thing that is indeed desired. Thought and impulse are not two kinds
of mental process: thought is impulse clarified by experience, impulse
is thought in chaos.
IV
Is Man a Political Animal?
Why is there a social problem? Is it because men are “bad”? Nonsense,
answers Spinoza: the terms “good” and “bad,” as conveying moral approval
and disapproval, are philosophically out of court; they mean nothing
except that “each of us wishes all men to live according to _his_
desire,” and consoles himself for their non-complaisance by making moral
phrases. There is a social problem, says Spinoza, because men are not
naturally social. This does not mean that there are no social tendencies
in the native human constitution; it does mean that these tendencies are
but a sorry fraction of man’s original nature, and do not avail to chain
the “ape and tiger” hiding under his extremely civilized shirt. Man is a
“political animal”; but he is also an animal. We must approach the
social problem through a very respectful consideration of the ape and
tiger; we must follow Hobbes and inquire into “the natural condition of
man.”
“In the state of nature every man lives as he wishes,”[88]--he is not
pestered with police regulations and aldermanic ordinances. He “_may_ do
whatever he _can_: his rights extend to the utmost limits of his
powers.”[89] He may fight, hate, deceive, exploit, to his heart’s
desire; and he does. We moderns smile at the “natural man” as a myth,
and think our forbears were social _ab initio_. But be it remembered
that by “social” Spinoza implies no mere preference of society to
solitude, but a subordination of individual caprice to more or less
tacit communal regulation. And Spinoza considers it useful, if we are
going to talk about “human nature in politics,” to ask whether man
_naturally_ submits to regulation or naturally rebels against it. When
he wrote of a primitive non-social human condition he wrote as a
psychologist inferring the past rather than as an historian revealing
it. He observed man, kindly yet keenly; he saw that “everyone desires to
keep down his fellow-men by all possible means, and when he prevails,
boasts more of the injuries he has done to others than of the advantage
he has won for himself”;[90] and he concluded that if we could trace
human history to its sources we should find a creature--call him human
or pre-human--willing, perhaps glad, to have the company of his like,
but still unattracted and unhampered by social organization.
We like to laugh at the simple anthropology of Spinoza and Rousseau; but
the laugh should be turned upon us when we suppose that the historical
_motif_ played any but a very minor part in the discussion of the
natural state of man. History was not the point at all: these men were
not interested in the past so much as in the possibilities of the
future. That is why the eighteenth century was so largely their
creation. When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when
he is interested in the future he makes it.
The point to be borne in mind, Spinoza urges, is that we are still
essentially unsocialized; the instinct to acquire possession and power,
if necessary by oppression and exploitation, is still stronger than the
disposition to share, to be tolerant of disagreement, and to work in
mutual aid. The “natural man” is not a myth, he is the solid reality
that struts about dressed in a little brief civilization. “Religion
teaches that each man should love his neighbor as himself, and defend
the rights of others as earnestly as he would his own. Yet this
conviction has very little influence over man’s emotions. It is no doubt
of some account in the hour of death, for then disease has weakened the
emotions, and the man lies helpless. And the principle is assented to in
church, for there men have no dealings with one another. But in the mart
or the court it has little or no effect, though that is just where the
need for it is greatest.”[91] He still “does everything for the sake of
his own profit”;[92] nor will even the unlimited future change him in
that, for it is his very essence. His happiness is in the pursuit of his
profit, his supreme joy is in the increase of his power. And a social
order built upon any other basis than this exuberant egoism of man will
be as lasting, in the eye of history, as a name that is writ in water.
V
What the Social Problem Is
But what if it is a good basis? What if “the foundation of virtue is the
endeavor to preserve one’s own being” to the uttermost?[93] What if
there is a way in which, without any hypocritical mystification, this
self-seeking, while still remaining self-seeking, may become
coöperation?
Spinoza’s answer is not startling: it is the Socratic answer, issuing
from a profound psychological analysis. Given the liberation and
development of intelligence, and the discordant strife of egos will
yield undreamed-of harmonies. Men are so made, they are so compact of
passion and obscurity, that they will not let one another be free; how
can that be changed? Deception has been tried, and has succeeded only
temporarily if at all. Compulsion has been tried; but compulsion is a
negative force, it makes for inhibition rather than inspiration. It is a
necessary evil; but hardly the last word of constructive social
thinking. There is something more in a man than his capacity for fear,
there is some other way of appealing to him than the way of threats;
there is his hunger and thirst to know and understand and develop. Think
of the untouched resources of this human desire for mental enlargement;
think of the millions who almost starve that they may learn. Is that the
force that is to build the future and fashion the city of our dreams?
Here are men torn with impulses, shaken by mutual interference; is it
conceivable that they would be so deeply torn and shaken if that hunger
of theirs for knowledge--knowledge of themselves, too,--were met with
generous opportunity? Men long to be reasonable; they know, even the
least of them, that under the tyranny of impulse there is no ultimately
fruitful life; what is there that they would not give for the power to
see things clearly and be captains of their souls? Here if anywhere is
an opportunity for such statesmanship as does not often grace the courts
of emperors and kings!
How we can come to know ourselves, our inmost nature, how we can through
this knowledge achieve coördination and our real desires,--that is for
Spinoza the heart of the social problem. The source of man’s strength is
that he can know his weakness. If he can but find himself out, then he
can change himself. “A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form
a clear and distinct idea of it.”[94] When a passion is tracked to its
lair and confronted with its futile partiality, its sting is drawn, it
can hurt us no more; it may coöperate but it may no longer rule. It is
seen to be “inadequate,” to express but a fragment of us, and so seen it
sinks into its place in the hierarchy of desires. “And in proportion as
we know our emotions better, the more are they susceptible to
control.”[95] Passion is passivity; control is power. Knowledge brings
control, and control brings freedom; freedom is not a gift, it is a
victory. Knowledge, control, freedom, power, virtue: these are all one
thing. Before the “empire of man over nature” must come the empire of
man over himself, must come coördination. Achievement is born of clear
vision and unified intent, not of actions that are but bubbles on the
muddy rapids of desire.
VI
Free Speech
“Before all things, a means must be devised for improving and clarifying
the understanding.”[96] “Since there is no single thing we know which is
more excellent than a man who is guided by reason, it follows that there
is nothing by which a person can better show how much skill and talent
he possesses than by so educating men that at last they will live under
the direct authority of reason.”[97] But how?
First of all, says Spinoza, thought must be absolutely free: we must
have the possible profit of even the most dangerous heresies. If that
proposition appear a trifle trite, let it be remembered that Spinoza
wrote at a time when Galileo’s broken-hearted retraction was still fresh
in men’s memories, and when Descartes was modifying his philosophy to
soothe the Jesuits. The chapter on freedom of thought is really the
pivotal point and _raison d’être_ of the _Tractatus Theologico-politicus_;
and it is still rich in encouragement and inspiration. Perhaps there is
nothing else in Spinoza’s writings that is so typical at once of his
gentleness and of his strength.
Free speech should be granted, Spinoza argues, because it must be
granted. Men may conceal real beliefs, but these same beliefs will
inevitably influence their behavior; a belief is not that which is
spoken, it is that which is done. A law against free speech is
subversive of law itself, for it invites derision from the
conscientious. “All laws which can be broken without any injury to
another are counted but a laughing-stock.”[98] It is useless for the
state to command “such things as are abhorrent to human nature.” “Men in
general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with
so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be
counted crimes against the law.... Under such circumstances men do not
think it disgraceful, but most honorable, to hold the laws in
abhorrence, and to refrain from no action against the government.”[99]
Where men are not permitted to criticise their rulers in public, they
will plot against them in private. There is no religious enthusiasm
stronger than that with which laws are broken by those whose liberty has
been suppressed.
Spinoza goes further. Thought must be liberated not only from legal
restrictions but from indirect and even unintentional compulsion as
well. Spinoza feels very strongly the danger to freedom, that is
involved in the organization of education by the state. “Academies that
are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to
cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free
commonwealth arts and sciences will be best cultivated to the full if
everyone that asks leave is allowed to teach in public, at his own cost
and risk.”[100] He would have preferred such “free lances” as the
Sophists to the state universities of the American Middle West. He did
not suggest means of avoiding the apparent alternative of universities
subsidized by the rich. It is a problem that has still to be solved.
In demanding absolute freedom of speech Spinoza touches the bases of
state organization. Nothing is so dangerous and yet so necessary; for
ignorance is the mother of authority. The defenders of free speech have
never yet met the contention of such men as Hobbes, that freedom of
thought is subversive of established government. The reason is only
this, that the contention is probably true, so far as most established
governments go. Absolute liberty of speech is assuredly destructive of
despotism, no matter how constitutional the despotism may be; and those
who have at heart the interests of any such government may be forgiven
for hesitating to applaud Spinoza. Freedom of speech makes for social
vitality, certainly; without it, indeed, the avenues of mental and
social development would be blocked, and life hardly worth living. But
freedom of speech cannot be said to make for social stability and
permanence, unless the social organization in question invites criticism
and includes some mechanism for profiting by it. Where democracy is
real, or is on the way to becoming real, free speech will help, not
harm, the state; for there is no man so loyal as the man who knows that
he may criticise his government freely and to some account. But where
there is the autocracy of a person or a class, freedom of speech makes
for dissolution,--dissolution, however, not of the society so much as of
the government. The Bourbons are gone, but France remains. Nay, if the
Bourbons had remained, France might be gone.
But to argue to-day for freedom of speech is to invite the charge of
emphasizing the obvious. It may be wholesome to remind ourselves, by a
few examples, that however universal the theory of free speech may be,
the practice is still rather sporadic. An American professor is
dismissed because he thinks there is a plethora of unearned income in
his country; an English publicist is reported to have been refused
“permission” to fill lecture engagements in America because he had not
been sufficiently patriotic; and one of the most prominent of living
philosophers loses his chair because he supposes that conscience has
rights against cabinets. But indeed our governing bodies are harmless
offenders here in comparison with the people themselves. The last lesson
which men and women will learn is the lesson of free thought and free
speech. The most famous of living dramatists finds himself unsafe in
London streets, because he has dared to criticise his government; the
most able of living novelists finds it convenient to leave Paris because
there are still some Germans whom he does not hate; and an American
community full of constitutional lawyers shows its love of “law and
order” by stoning a group of boys bent on expounding the desirability of
syndicalism.
Perhaps the world has need of many Spinozas still.
VII
Virtue as Power
Freedom of expression is the corner-stone of Spinoza’s politics; the
postulate without which he refuses to proceed. But Spinoza does not have
to be told that this question of free speech precipitates him into the
larger problems of “the individual _vs._ the state”; he knows that that
problem is the very _raison d’être_ of political philosophy; he knows
that indeed the problem goes to the core of philosophy, and finds its
source and crux in the complex socio-egoistical make-up of the
individual man.
The “God-intoxicated” Spinoza is quite sober and disillusioned about the
social possibilities of altruism. “It is a universal law of human
nature that no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good,
except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”[101] “This is as
necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.”[102] This
confident reduction of human conduct to self-reference does not for
Spinoza involve any condemnation: “reason, since it asks for nothing
that is opposed to nature, demands that every person should ... seek his
own profit.”[103] Observe, reason _demands_ this; this same self-seeking
is the most valuable and necessary item in the composition of man.
Spinoza, as said, goes so far as to identify this self-seeking with
virtue: “to act absolutely in conformity with virtue is, in us, nothing
but to act, live, and preserve our being (these three have the same
meaning) as reason directs, from the ground of seeking our own
profit.”[104] This is a brave rejection of self-renunciation and
asceticism by one whose nature, so far as we can judge it now, inclined
him very strongly in the direction of these “virtues.” What we have to
do, says Spinoza, is not to deny the self, but to broaden it; here
again, of course, intelligence is the mother of morals. Progress lies
not in self-reduction but in self-expansion. Progress is increase in
virtue, but “by virtue and power I understand the same thing”;[105]
progress is an increase in the ability of men to achieve their ends. It
is part of our mental confectionery to define progress in terms of our
own ends; a nation is “backward” or “forward” according as it moves
towards or away from our own ideals. But that, says Spinoza, is naïve
nonsense; a nation is progressive or backward according as its citizens
are or are not developing greater power to realize _their own_ purposes.
That is a doctrine that may have “dangerous” implications, but
intelligence will face the implications and the facts, ready not to
suppress them but to turn them to account.
It was the passion for power that led to the first social groupings and
developed the social instincts. Our varied sympathies, our parental and
filial impulses, our heroisms and generosities, all go back to social
habits born of individual needs. “Since fear of solitude exists in all
men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and
procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men by nature tend
towards social organization.”[106] “Let satirists scoff at human affairs
as much as they please, let theologians denounce them, and let the
melancholy, despising men and admiring brutes, praise as much as they
can a life rude and without refinement,--men will nevertheless find out
that by mutual help they can much more easily procure the things they
need, and that it is only by their united strength that they can avoid
the dangers which everywhere threaten them.”[107] _Nihil homine homini
utilius._ Men discover that they are useful to one another, and that
mutual profit from social organization increases as intelligence grows.
In a “state of nature”--that is, before social organization--each man
has a “natural right” to do all that he is strong enough to do; in
society he yields part of this sovereignty to the communal organization,
because he finds that this concession, universalized, increases his
strength. The fear of solitude, and not any positive love of fellowship,
is the prime force in the origin of society. Man does not join in social
organization because he has social instincts; he develops such instincts
as the result of joining in such organization.
VIII
Freedom and Order
Even to-day the social instincts are not strong enough to prevent
unsocial behavior. “Men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be
made so.”[108] Hence custom and law. Each man, in his sober moments,
desires such social arrangements as will protect him from aggression and
interference. “There is no one who does not wish to live, so far as
possible, in security and without fear; and this cannot possibly happen
so long as each man is allowed to do as he pleases.”[109] “That men who
are necessarily subject to passions, and are inconstant and changeable,
may be able to live together in security, and to trust one another’s
fidelity,”--that is the purpose of law.[110] Ideally, the state is to
the individual what reason is to passion.[111] Law protects a man not
only from the passions of others, but from his own; it is a help to
delayed response. How to frame laws so that the greatest possible number
of men may find their own security and fulfilment in allegiance to the
law,--that is the problem of the statesman. Law implies force, but so
does life, so does nature; indeed, the punishments decreed by “man-made”
states are usually milder than those which in a “state of nature” would
be the natural consequents of most interferences; not seldom the law--as
when it prevents lynching--protects an aggressor from the natural
results of his act. Force is the essence of law; hence international law
will not really be law until nations are coördinated into a larger group
possessed of the instrumentalities of compulsion.[112]
It is clear that Spinoza has the philosophic love of order. “Whatever
conduces to human harmony and fellowship is good; whatever brings
discord into the state is evil.”[113] But discord, one must repeat, is
often the prelude to a greater harmony; development implies variation,
and all variation is a discord except to ears that hear the future. The
social sanction of liberty lies of course in the potential value of
variations; without that vision of new social possibilities which is
suggested by variations from the norm a people perishes. Spinoza does
not see this; but there is a fine passage in the _Tractatus
Politicus_[114] which shows him responsive to the ideal of liberty as
well as to that of order: “The last end of the state is not to dominate
men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from
fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to
himself or his neighbor. The end of the state is, I repeat, not to make
rational beings into brute beasts or machines. It is to enable their
bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by,
and to exercise, a free reason, that they may not waste their strength
in hatred, anger, and guile, not act unfairly toward one another. Thus
the end of the state is really liberty.”
So it is that Spinoza takes sharp issue with Hobbes and exalts freedom,
decentralization, and democracy, where Hobbes, starting with almost
identical premises, concludes to a centralized despotism of body and
soul. This does not mean that Spinoza had no eye for the defects of
democracy. “Experience is supposed to teach that it makes for peace and
concord when all authority is conferred upon one man. For no political
order has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks,
while none have been so short-lived, nay, so vexed by seditions, as
popular or democratic states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation
are to be called peace, then peace is the worst misfortune that can
befall a state. It is true that quarrels are wont to be sharper and more
frequent between parents and children than between masters and slaves;
yet it advances not the art of home life to change a father’s right into
a right of property, and count his children as only his slaves. Slavery,
then, and not peace, comes from the giving of all power to one man. For
peace consists not in the absence of war, but in a union and harmony of
men’s souls.”[115]
No; better the insecurity of freedom than the security of bondage.
Better the dangers that come of the ignorance of majorities than those
that flow from the concentration of power in the hands of an inevitably
self-seeking minority. Even secret diplomacy is worse than the risks of
publicity. “It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute
power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs be
conducted in secret.... But the more such arguments disguise themselves
under the mask of public welfare the more oppressive is the slavery to
which they will lead.... Better that right counsels be known to enemies,
than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the
citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it
absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in
time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.... It is
folly to choose to avoid a small loss by means of the greatest of
evils.”[116]
This is but one of many passages in Spinoza that startle the reader with
their present applicability and value. There is in the same treatise a
plan for an unpaid citizen soldiery, much like the scheme adopted in
Switzerland; there is a plea against centralization and for the
development of municipal pride by home rule and responsibility; there is
a warning against the danger to democracy involved in the territorial
expansion of states; and there is a plan for the state ownership of all
land, the rental from this to supply all revenue in time of peace. But
let us pass to a more characteristic feature of Spinoza’s political
theory, and consider with him the function of intelligence in the state.
IX
Democracy and Intelligence
“There is no single thing in nature which is more profitable to man than
a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.”[117] Such a man,
to begin with, has made his peace with the inevitable, and accepts with
good cheer the necessary limitations of social life. He has a genial
sense of human imperfections, and does not cushion himself upon Utopia.
He pursues his own ends but with some perspective of their social
bearings; and he is confident that “when each man seeks that which is
[really] profitable to himself, then are men most profitable to one
another.”[118] He knows that the ends of other men will often conflict
with his; but he will not for that cause make moral phrases at them. He
feels the tragedy of isolated purposes, and knows the worth of
coöperation. As he comes to understand the intricate bonds between
himself and his fellows he finds ever more satisfaction in purposes that
overflow the narrow margins of his own material advantage; until at last
he learns to desire nothing for himself without desiring an equivalent
for others.[119]
Given such men, democracy follows; such democracy, too, as will be a
fulfilment and not a snare. Given such men, penal codes will interest
only the antiquarian. Given such men, a society will know the full
measure of civic allegiance and communal stability and development. How
make such men? By revivals? By the gentle anæsthesia of heaven and the
cheap penology of hell? By memorizing catechisms and commandments? By
appealing like Comte, to the heart, and trusting to the eternal feminine
to lead us ever onward? (Onward whither?) Or by spreading the means of
intelligence?
It is at this point that the social philosophy of Spinoza, like that of
Socrates, betrays its weaker side. How is intelligence to be spread?
Perhaps it is too much to ask the philosopher this question; he may feel
that he has done enough if he has made clear what it is which will most
help us to achieve our ends. Spinoza, after all, was not the kind of man
who could be expected to enter into practical problems; his soul was
filled with the vision of the eternal laws and had no room for the
passing expediencies of action. His devotional geometry was a typical
Jewish performance; there is something in the emotional make-up of the
Jew which makes him slide very easily into the attitude of worship, as
contrasted with the Græco-Roman emphasis on intellect and control. All
pantheism tends to quietism; to see things _sub specie eternitatis_ may
very well pass from the attitude of the scientist to the attitude of the
mystic who has no interest in temporal affairs. It is the task of
philosophy to study the eternal and universal not for its own sake but
for its worth in directing us through the maze of temporal particulars;
the philosopher must be like the mariner who guides himself through
space and time by gazing at the everlasting stars. It is wholesome that
the history of philosophy should begin with Thales; so that all who
come to the history of philosophy may learn, at the door of their
subject, that though stars are beautiful, wells are deep.
X
The Legacy of Spinoza
But to leave the matter thus would be to lose a part of the truth in the
glare of one’s brilliance. We have to recognize that though Spinoza
stopped short (or rather was cut short) at merely a statement of the
prime need of all democracies,--intelligence,--he was nevertheless the
inspiration of men who carried his beginning more nearly to a practical
issue. To Spinoza, through Voltaire and the English deists, one may
trace not a few of the thought-currents which carried away the
foundations of ecclesiastical power, civil and intellectual, in
eighteenth-century France, and left the middle class conscience-free to
engineer a revolution. It was from Spinoza chiefly that Rousseau derived
his ideas of popular sovereignty, of the general will, of the right of
revolution, of the legitimacy of the force that makes men free, and of
the ideal state as that in which all the citizens form an assembly with
final power.[120] The French Declaration of Rights and the American
Declaration of Independence go back in part to the forgotten treatises
of the quiet philosopher of Amsterdam. To have initiated or accelerated
such currents of thought--theoretical in their origin but extremely
practical in their issue--is thereby once for all to have put one’s self
above the reach of mere fault-finding. One wonders again, as so many
have wondered, what would have been the extent of this man’s achievement
had he not died at the age of forty-four. When Spinoza’s pious landlady
returned from church on the morning of February 21, 1677, and found her
gentle philosopher dead, she stood in the presence of one of the great
silent tragedies of human history.