When in 1658 he was excommunicated by the Jews at Amsterdam, he turned
with eager curiosity to the learning if not to the faith of the
Christians. In particular the Dutch physician, Francis Van den Ende,
himself a freethinker, became his teacher and friend. From him Spinoza
acquired his knowledge of Latin and German, by him was initiated into
the sciences and introduced to the works of Giordano Bruno and of
one other destined to play a determining part in his thought, René
Descartes--“the father of modern philosophy” as he is sometimes called.
Descartes, whose life overlaps that of Bruno at the one end and of
Spinoza at the other, is founder of the school of thought the historian
calls Rationalistic. Now a rationalist is obviously enough one who is
bent on following his reason, but reason as opposed to what? We think
first of reason as opposed to authority and revelation; but although
rationalism came inevitably to discard these sources of belief--had
already discarded them in the thought of our very Spinoza--the father
of rationalism had left some room for both; partly because it might
furnish a convenient refuge if the official church with which he
desired to live in comfortable relation should press him; partly
because Descartes was in one or two respects less of a rationalist
than his school.
On the other hand the master was emphatic enough on the distinction
between the reason and the senses. It might seem to us moderns that the
old saying “seeing is believing,” with its implied prohibition against
believing aught that might not be seen, erred, if at all, from a very
excess of reasonableness. To Descartes, seeing with the body’s eye was
still but flimsy evidence. This organ had too often deceived him to be
implicitly trusted, and to back its testimony with that of the other
senses,--touch, taste, smell, hearing--was but to multiply unreliable
witnesses. Their combined voices might give a certain presumption in
favor of their opinion but never an assurance amounting to certainty.
Not indeed with the eye of the body but with the eye of the mind could
we see truth in its nakedness. But what is this organ, this eye of the
mind, and who is to teach us to use it? The mathematicians, Descartes
replies, have long possessed it and long used it. It is to them we must
turn for instruction.
If we do--if we turn to Euclid, say--we find that the whole complex and
difficult body of truth that we call geometry is made to follow from a
few simple truths so certain that we call them self-evident. Why should
not all truths be susceptible of the same kind of proof? Why should
we not be able to find an axiom of axioms whose certainty was no mere
matter of observation, and why, if we find it, should we not be able to
draw from it all possible truth, as we deduce the theorems of geometry
from its axioms?
It was this idea that Descartes followed and it was this idea that
Spinoza accepted at his hands: To construct a theory of life that
should be no mere summing up of various peoples’ experiences, but
should, after the manner of geometry, draw from an indubitable source
the certainties of morals and religion no less than the truths of
science.
But when we learn what is this axiom of axioms that Spinoza received
from Descartes and made the fountain head of all truth, we find
ourselves spectators of one of those curious tricks of the human mind
that make its history always diverting. It may well seem to us as
though rationalism were not so much standing on its reason as standing
on its head. For that axiom which is to be the simplest and most
certain of all truths, more elementary than that 2 and 2 make 4, or
that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points,--that
axiom is the very proposition before which most of us find our reason
staggering, our faith panting and breathless. That axiom consists of
two words: “_God is_.”
I do not propose to develop here the tortured processes of reasoning by
which the rationalists were wont to convince themselves that _what_ God
is and _that_ He is, were no mere questions of experience. It seemed
to them as though the very meaning of God assured his existence. But I
question if in the end any of our day would be strongly convinced by
their argument about it. The whole matter is of the less importance
that Spinoza’s results in the domain of ethics are not so dependent on
his method but that one may readily reword the problem of 17th century
rationalism in the language of modern science.
Nevertheless it is in the first instance devotion to the method he had
received from Descartes that requires Spinoza to differ with his master
on two points of the greatest importance to the sequel. This God, this
“all-perfect being” as the rationalists commonly defined Him, plays a
rather capricious part in Descartes’ thinking. He is represented as the
Creator of the physical universe, and in this act of creation as quite
arbitrarily choosing this sort of a world rather than another, a world
working out a destiny that is not chosen because it is good but is good
because it is chosen of _God_. For the rest, what this end may be is
beyond the ken of human reason, and after having done homage to the
divine purpose Descartes feels at liberty to confine his attention to
studying the mechanism and reconstructing the history of nature as we
find it.
Here one can imagine Spinoza exclaiming “What! You would follow the
guidance of the geometers, deducing all truth from the axiom of God’s
existence, and you leave it to God to decide what shall and what shall
not follow from his nature!” Do then the axioms of geometry select the
theorems they shall establish, accepting some and rejecting others
for a motive whether good or bad? No, says Spinoza, God has neither
intellect nor will: facts and laws follow from His nature as the
properties of a triangle from its definition.
The other element of caprice in Descartes’ final picture of the
world is just _man_. He alone of all things occupying a place in
God’s universe is not subjected to mechanical law. But how, Spinoza
may well ask, can we conceive ourselves to be following the lead of
mathematicians if we violate the first principles of their science?
Does the geometry of a triangle depend upon the place in which the
triangle finds itself? How then can the laws of the behavior of bodies
depend upon these bodies being in or out of the human machine? The
human body must be determined by the same laws of physics that govern
all extended things. “And as for the mind,” Spinoza adds, “the order
and connection of its ideas are parallel to the order and connection
of the bodily states.”
“There is,” he concludes, “in mind no absolute or free will; but the
mind is determined to this or that volition by a cause which has itself
been determined by another cause, this again by another and so on _in
infinitum_.”
* * * * *
That the world reflects God’s choice, that it might to a perfect
understanding reveal God’s purpose, that in it the human being is free
in body or mind; these are aspects of irrationality which Spinoza is
eager to remove from the fair creation of reason. They represent to
him last vestiges of vulgar thought of which the master had after all
been unable to rid himself. Spinoza is at his best in exposing the
psychology of the multitude with its quaint illusions respecting God
and man. In the famous appendix to the first book of the Ethics he
summons these prejudices as he calls them before the bar of reason:
“They all,” he lays it down, “depend on just this one; that men
commonly suppose all things in nature to act as they themselves do
with a view to some end, nay, even assume that God himself directs all
things to some definite end, saying that God has made all things for
man, and man that he might worship God. I shall therefore consider this
prejudice. I shall inquire in the first place why most persons assent
to it and all are by nature so prone to embrace it. In the second place
I shall show that it is false; and lastly I shall show how there have
sprung from it prejudices respecting good and evil, merit and sin,
praise and blame, beauty and ugliness, and other things of the sort....
“It will here suffice to assume certain facts all must admit, namely,
that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all
men have, and are conscious of having, an impulse to seek their own
advantage. From this it follows _first_ that men think themselves free
for the reason that they are conscious of their volitions and desires,
and, being ignorant of the causes by which they are led to will and
desire, they do not so much as dream of these. It follows _second_ that
men do everything with some purpose in view; that is, with a view to
the advantage they seek. Hence it is they always desire to know the
motives of action, and when they have learned these, are satisfied.”
Against this background Spinoza sketches in with a few quick, vigorous
strokes what we may call his psychology of popular religion.
“Since men find in themselves,” he writes, “and external to themselves,
many things which are of no small assistance in obtaining what is to
their advantage, as for example, the eyes for seeing, the teeth for
chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for giving light, and
so on, this has led them to regard all things in nature as means to
their advantage. And knowing these means to have been discovered, not
provided by themselves, they have made this a reason for believing
that there is some one else who has provided them for their use. But
as they had never had any information concerning the character of this
being, they had to judge it from their own. Hence, they maintained
that the gods direct all things with a view to man’s advantage, to
lay men under obligation to themselves, and to be held in the highest
honor; whence it has come to pass that each one has thought out for
himself, according to his disposition, a different way of worshipping
God, that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the
service of his ... desire. But while they sought to show that nature
does nothing uselessly (in other words nothing that is not to man’s
advantage) they seem to have shown only that nature and gods and men
are all equally mad.”
And Spinoza seizes the opportunity to pay tribute to a respectable,
well-worn theology:
“Just see how far the thing has been carried! Among all useful
things in nature they could not help finding a few harmful things,
as tempests, earthquakes, diseases, etc. They maintained that these
occurred because the gods were angry on account of injuries done
them by men or on account of faults committed in their worship. And
although experience daily contradicted this and showed by an infinity
of instances that good and evil fall to the lot of the pious and of the
impious indifferently, that did not make them abandon their inveterate
prejudice. They found it easier to class these facts with other unknown
things whose use they could not name and thus to retain their present
and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of
their reasoning and think out a new one. Hence they assumed that the
judgment of the gods very far surpasses man’s power of comprehension.”
This in itself, Spinoza concludes, would have been sufficient to hide
the truth forever from mankind had not science, which looks into the
why and not the wherefore of things, shown men a different standard of
truth.
The second paragraph in which he fulfils his promise to show the folly
of the popular belief in a providence is pervaded by a dry humor:
“I must not overlook the fact that the adherents of this doctrine
who have chosen to display their ingenuity in assigning final causes
to things, have employed in support of their doctrine a new form of
argument, namely, a reductio, not ad absurdum, but ad ignorantiam;
which shows that there was no other way to set about proving this
doctrine. If, for example, a stone has fallen from a roof upon
someone’s head and has killed him, they will prove as follows: If it
did not fall in accordance with God’s will for this purpose, how could
there have been a chance concurrence of so many circumstances?...
Perhaps you will answer, It happened because the wind blew and the man
had an errand there. But they will insist, Why did the wind blow at
that time? and why had that man an errand that way at just that time?
If you answer again, The wind rose at that time because on the day
before, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to be rough
and the man had an invitation from a friend, they will again insist,
since one may ask no end of questions, But why was the sea rough? and
why was the man invited at that time? And so they will keep on asking
the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that
asylum of ignorance.... Hence it happens that he who seeks for the
true causes of miracles and endeavors like a scholar to comprehend
things in nature, and not like a fool to wonder at them, is everywhere
regarded and proclaimed an heretic and an impious man by those whom the
multitude reverence as interpreters of nature and the gods. But this I
leave and pass on to the third point I promised to treat here.”
The treatment of this third point, our perverted notions of good and
evil, beauty and ugliness, etc., may readily be imagined. “Since men as
we have just said believe that everything was made for their sake, they
call the nature of a thing good or bad, sound or corrupt, according
as it affects _them_.” And from this springs the world-old _problem
of evil_ as it is called. “Many are accustomed to reason as follows:
If everything has followed from the necessity of God’s most perfect
nature, whence so many imperfections in nature, the stinking rottenness
of things, their disgusting ugliness, confusion, evil, sin and so
forth?” But those who ask thus are merely confused, for “the perfection
of things is to be determined solely from their nature and power, nor
are things more or less perfect because they please or displease men’s
senses, are helpful or harmful to man’s nature.”
* * * * *
Were we to lay aside our Spinoza at this point, we should be inclined
to agree with the judgment of most of his contemporaries and of his
successors for more than a century, that although the name of God is
constantly on his lips his thought makes the name an empty one, that
he is at bottom an atheist. Furthermore we should fail to see how
he could have called his great work an “ethics,” inasmuch as it is
hardly to be understood how in a world where every act of the body is
necessitated by eternal laws of physics, every thought of the mind by
equally rigid laws of psychology, there could be such a thing as a good
or bad act, a good or bad thought. Where there is no freedom, how can
there be right and wrong, worth and unworthiness?
And yet we shall find that into this hard inhospitable world-picture,
Spinoza has set a theory of life that not only recognizes and defines
the difference between the good and the bad, but culminates in a phrase
whose religious feeling is unmistakable: Virtue is knowledge; the only
knowledge is to know God; to know God is to love him. If one grasp this
part of his philosophy, one will understand how it came about that him
whom the eighteenth century called atheist, the nineteenth remembered
as a _Gottrunkener Mensch_--a God-intoxicated man.
It would be too much to attempt to follow the technical expression
that Spinoza gives to his thought. Every word is heavy with the burden
of long centuries of scholasticism. But I think it is not impossible
to put oneself in possession of one principal idea on which the rest
follows, not without jolt, yet with a fair degree of ease.
Let us then put the problem clearly before us. Suppose Nature,
including the incident of human life, were one great machine without
purpose in the whole, without freedom in the detail, how would it be
possible to regard any part of nature, a given man for example, as
either good or bad? If this man lives as he must, what use, nay what
meaning in advising him how he _ought_ to live?
Spinoza’s answer involves this fundamental point. There are some
machines that exist for a purpose. We may, if we choose, regard it
as _the nature_ of such a machine to accomplish this purpose. In
proportion as it accomplishes it we call it good; in proportion as
it fails we call it bad. Thus a clock is mechanical enough, a matter
of cogwheels and springs, but that is not _the nature_ of a clock,
for we can recognize such an implement without knowing anything about
these same cogwheels and springs, if only we know that the thing keeps
time. As it keeps accurate time we call it a good clock, and as it
loses or gains we call it a bad one. It is true that we do not exactly
blame the clock if it goes wrong; we rather blame the clock-maker.
But there is no reason why we should cease to blame the clock-maker,
were we to convince ourselves that he too was a mechanism, and owed
his lack of skill to the physical constitution of hands and brain.
In a word, a mechanism whose nature is to perform a certain function
may nevertheless be a good or a bad mechanism for the purpose, and is
praiseworthy or blameworthy in so far as it performs its function well
or ill.
It is only then a mechanism that reveals in its behavior the pursuit of
a purpose that may be regarded as good or bad. So too it is only such
a mechanism that may be regarded as more or less free, more or less
bound. This notion of freedom and bondage that Spinoza here introduces,
turns on a distinction which all of us make without realizing the
difficulty of defining what we mean by it. It is the distinction
between a being and its environment. With respect to each thing Spinoza
divides nature into two parts: one part he calls the inner nature of
the thing; the other, nature external to it. Now in one use of the
term “nature” this distinction seems to be an impossible one; for in
so far as I regard a man’s body as composed of atoms obeying the laws
of mechanics, everything that takes place among these atoms is the
resultant of the relation of these atoms to all others in the universe.
“It is impossible,” Spinoza himself sees it--“it is impossible for a
man not to be a part of nature and not to follow its general order.”
But suppose in reference to a given kind of body we neglect all
those differences in behavior that make neither for nor against the
accomplishment of a purpose we have ascribed to it. Will not the grain
of corn spring up in this field or in that? Will not the human being
pass through the cycle of life in this age and country, or in that?
And in so far as he carries out the purposes of his being in various
surroundings, whatever difference of detail in his way of doing it,
may we not say that man has a nature of his own independent of his
environment? Finally is not this just what we mean by being free: the
ability to carry out one’s end independently of the circumstances in
which one is placed? On the other hand is not an inability to win out
under all circumstances just what we mean by bondage?
There is then no reason why we should not recognize freedom and
bondage, good and evil, in certain _parts_ of a world that atom by atom
is mechanical and purposeless in its constitution.
* * * * *
Having presented this central idea, we may now follow with greater ease
Spinoza’s account of the degree of freedom of which a man is capable,
of the use of this freedom which we should call good, and finally of
the rewards of a “good life.”
Here we seem to have asked three questions because we have followed the
general ideas on the subject. To these questions, however, Spinoza
would return a single answer. To be good, to be free, to be blessed
mean one and the same thing. It is a divine thought, if only it can be
made to appear.
First then let us note that we habitually distinguish the forms of
life as higher and lower; the grain of corn is lower than the bee, the
bee is lower than the man. If we ask ourselves what we mean by this
distinction, we shall find I think that we refer to the difference of
the degree to which these forms are capable of carrying out a given
purpose whatever the environment. The biologist would say they differ
in adaptability. Take merely the common end of self-preservation: the
grain of corn is lost if it fall on rocky ground or among the thorns.
It can do nothing to save itself. To the bee these circumstances are
indifferent, yet it in turn would succumb to a blight of the flowers.
To the man, this would be but a small matter and we enjoy losing
ourselves in admiration of the ingenuity with which he manages to
subsist under the most unusual and threatening conditions. In a word,
the higher the form of life, the greater the freedom from environment;
the lower, the greater the bondage to circumstance.
What now in the future of a thing determines its degree of freedom?
Spinoza studies the question only within the domain of human life.
Within this domain his answer is striking: Freedom comes with
knowledge; ignorance is bondage.
But there is more than one sense in which this saying may be taken. We
have for example the Baconian thought, “knowledge is power.” That is,
given any end to be striven for, other things being equal the one who
brings science to bear is the more likely to conquer circumstances,
to triumph, to be free. This sense of the power of knowledge is not
lacking in Spinoza.
But the freedom that comes with knowledge may be of a higher kind than
the mere bettering of our chances of success. After all, human skill is
extremely limited; defeat is every man’s portion, and one of the most
important questions in life is how to bear failure.
If knowledge is our best arm to ward off defeat, so is it our best
solace when defeat, the inevitable, comes. For do we but understand
that the fate that has come upon us was not to be escaped but was
imposed by the eternal laws of nature, repining becomes impossible.
Pain is a fact, we cannot escape it altogether, we cannot deny it when
it has seized us. We _can_ though prevent the sourness and bitterness
that the ignorant fall prey to when they suffer. For pain is one thing,
hate another. Pain is not to be escaped; hate may be. And the way to
kill hate in our hearts is to connect the individual fact that is
painful with the whole order of nature which makes this as every other
fact necessary. Now the order of nature as we have seen flows from God
as the theorems of geometry flow from its axioms. To understand the
necessity of any fact is to recognize God as its cause. When we have
done this the bitterness of defeat is gone. No man, says Spinoza, can
hate God.
I have mentioned two senses in which knowledge meant freedom: (1) the
sense in which it reduces the chances of failure and pain to a minimum;
(2) the sense in which it frees us from the bondage of passion and
bitterness, when the unavoidable remainder of pain comes upon us. There
is still one deepest sense in which knowledge is freedom. So far, the
excellence of knowledge has been made to depend upon its fitness as a
means--either to the end of obtaining a maximum of success, or to the
end of bearing the still inevitable minimum of defeat. We have now to
consider knowledge as an end in itself.
Since, as we have seen, the pain of life is the sense of defeat, of
limitation; its pleasure the sense of triumph, of freedom, we should
expect to find Spinoza urging as the blessed way of life that one, if
any such there be, which could meet no defeat; that one whose success
did not hang upon circumstances in which a man’s life happened to be
cast; that life, in a word, that was at each moment absolute freedom.
You will doubtless have anticipated that these blessings are claimed by
our philosopher for that way of life which is a single hearted pursuit
of knowledge. “Wherefore,” he has written, “the ultimate aim of the man
who is controlled by reason, that is, the highest desire with which he
strives to restrain all others, is that which impels him adequately to
know himself and all other things that can fall within the scope of his
understanding.”
And again he has said: “There is nothing in nature that is opposed
to the understanding; nothing that can destroy it.” (The word
“understanding” replaces the original expression “intellectual love.”
We shall see presently that for Spinoza to understand is to love God.)