Spinoza smiled. Theology demanded perfect obedience, he thought, even
as philosophy demanded perfect knowledge, and both alike were saving;
for the believing mob, therefore, to which Religion meant subversion
of Reason, speculative opinions were to be accounted pious or impious,
not as they were true or false, but as they confirmed or shook the
believer's obedience.
Refusing her solicitous offers of a warm meal, and merely begging her
to buy him a loaf, he began to read his arrears of letters, picking
them up one after another with no eagerness but with calm interest.
His correspondence was varied. Some of it was taken up with criticisms
of his thought--products of a leisurely age when the thinkers of
Europe were a brotherhood, calling to each other across the dim
populations; some represented the more deferential doubts of disciples
or the elegant misunderstandings of philosophic dilettanti, some his
friendly intercourse with empirical physicists like Boyle or like
Huyghens, whose telescope had enlarged the philosopher's universe and
the thinker's God; there was an acknowledgment of the last scholium
from the young men's society of Amsterdam--"_Nil volentibus
arduum_,"--to which he sent his _Ethica_ in sections for discussion;
the metropolis which had banished him not being able to keep out his
thought. There was the usual demand for explanations of difficulties
from Blyenbergh, the Dort merchant and dignitary, accompanied this
time by a frightened yearning to fly back from Reason to Revelation.
And the letter with the seal of the Royal Society proved equally
faint-hearted, Oldenburg exhorting him not to say anything in his next
book to loosen the practice of virtue. "Dear Heinrich!" thought
Spinoza. "How curious are men! All these years since first we met at
Rijnburg he has been goading and spurring me on to give my deepest
thought to the world. 'Twas always, 'Cast out all fear of stirring up
against thee the pigmies of the time--Truth before all--let us spread
our sails to the wind of true Knowledge.' And now the tune is, 'O pray
be careful not to give sinners a handle!' Well, well, so I am not to
tell men that the highest law is self-imposed; that there is no virtue
even in virtues that do not express the essence of one's being. Oh,
and I am to beware particularly of telling them their wills are not
free, and that they only think so because they are conscious of their
desires, but not of the causes of them. I fear me even Oldenburg does
not understand that virtue follows as necessarily from adequate
knowledge as from the definition of a triangle follows that its angles
are equal to two right angles. I am, I suppose, also to let men
continue to think that the planetary system revolves round them, and
that thunders and lightnings wait upon their wrong-doing. Oldenburg
has doubtless been frighted by the extravagances of the restored
Court. But 'tis not my teachings will corrupt the gallants of
Whitehall. Those who live best by Revelation through Tradition must
cling to it, but Revelation through Reason is the living testament of
God's word, nor so liable as the dead letter to be corrupted by human
wickedness. Strange that it is thought no crime to speak unworthily of
the mind, the true divine light, no impiety to believe that God would
commit the treasure of the true record of Himself to any substance
less enduring than the human heart."
A business letter made a diversion. It concerned the estate of the
deceased medical student, Simon De Vries, a devoted disciple, who
knowing himself doomed to die young, would have made the Master his
heir, had not Spinoza, by consenting to a small annual subsidy,
persuaded him to leave his property to his brother. The grateful heir
now proposed to increase Spinoza's allowance to five hundred florins.
"How unreasonable people are!" mused the philosopher again. "I agreed
once for all to accept three hundred, and I will certainly not be
burdened with a _stuiver_ more."
His landlady here entered with the loaf, and Spinoza, having paid and
entered the sum in his household account-book, cut himself a slice,
adding thereto some fragments of Dutch cheese from a package in his
hand-bag.
"Thou didst leave some wine in the bottle," she reminded him.
"Let it grow older," he answered. "My book shows more than two pints
last month, and my journey was costly. To make both ends meet I shall
have to wriggle," he added jestingly, "like the snake that tries to
get its tail in its mouth." He cut open a packet, discovering that a
friend had sent him some conserve of red roses from Amsterdam. "Now
am I armed against fever," he said blithely. Then, with a remembrance,
"Pray take some up to our poor Signore. I had forgotten to inquire!"
"Oh, he is out teaching again, thanks to thee. He hath set up a candle
for thee in his church."
A tender smile twitched the philosopher's lip, as the door closed.
A letter from Herr Leibnitz set him wondering uneasily what had taken
the young German Crichton from Frankfort, and what he was about in
Paris. They had had many a discussion in this little lodging, but he
was not yet sure of the young man's single-mindedness. The contents of
the letter were, however, unexpectedly pleasing. For it concerned not
the philosopher but the working-man. Even his intimates could not
quite sympathize with his obstinate insistence on earning his living
by handicraft--a manual activity by which the excommunicated Jew was
brother to the great Rabbis of the Talmud; they could not understand
the satisfaction of the craftsman, nor realize that to turn out his
little lenses as perfectly as possible was as essential a part of his
life as that philosophical activity which alone interested them. That
his prowess as an optician should be invoked by Herr Leibnitz gave him
a gratification which his fame as a philosopher could never evoke. The
only alloy was that he could not understand what Leibnitz wanted.
"That rays from points outside the optic axis may be united exactly in
the same way as those in the optic axis, so that the apertures of
glasses may be made of any size desired without impairing distinctness
of vision!" He wrinkled his brow and fell to making geometrical
diagrams on the envelope, but neither his theoretical mathematics nor
his practical craftsmanship could grapple with so obscure a request,
and he forgot to eat while he pondered. He consulted his own treatise
on the Rainbow, but to no avail. At length in despair he took up the
last letter, to find a greater surprise awaiting him. A communication
from Professor Fabritius, it bore an offer from the Elector Palatine
of a chair at the University of Heidelberg. The fullest freedom in
philosophy was to be conceded him: the only condition that he should
not disturb the established religion.
His surprise passed rapidly into mistrust. Was this an attempt on the
part of Christianity to bribe him? Was the Church repeating the
tactics of the Synagogue? It was not so many years since the
messengers of the congregation had offered him a pension of a thousand
florins not to disturb _its_ "established religion." Fullest freedom
in philosophy, forsooth! How was that to be reconciled with impeccable
deference to the ruling religion? A courtier like Descartes might
start from the standpoint of absolute doubt and end in a pilgrimage to
Our Lady of Loretto; but for himself, who held miracles impossible,
and if possible irrelevant, there could be no such compromise with a
creed whose very basis was miracle. True, there was a sense in which
Christ might be considered _os Dei_--the mouth of God,--but it was not
the sense in which the world understood it, the world which
caricatured all great things, which regarded piety and religion, and
absolutely all things related to greatness of soul, as burdens to be
laid aside after death, toils to be repaid by a soporific beatitude;
which made blessedness the prize of virtue instead of the synonym of
virtue. Nay, nay, not even the unexpected patronage of the Most Serene
Carl Ludwig could reconcile his thoughts with popular theology.
How curious these persistent attempts of friend and foe alike to
provide for his livelihood, and what mistaken reverence his persistent
rejections had brought him! People could not lift their hands high
enough in admiration because he followed the law of his nature,
because he preferred a simple living, simply earned, while for
criminals who followed equally the laws of their nature they had anger
rather than pity. As well praise the bee for yielding honey or the
rose for making fragrant the air. Certainly his character had more of
honey than of sting, of rose than of thorn; humility was an
unnecessary addition to the world's suffering; but that he did not
lack sting or thorn, his own sisters had discovered when they had
tried to keep their excommunicated brother out of his patrimony. How
puzzled Miriam and Rebekah had been by his forcing them at law to give
up the money and then presenting it to them. They could not see that
to prove the outcast Jew had yet his legal rights was a duty; the
money itself a burden. Yes, popular ethics was sadly to seek, and
involuntarily his hand stretched itself out and lovingly possessed
itself of the ever-growing manuscript of his _magnum opus_. His eye
caressed those serried concatenated propositions, resolving and
demonstrating the secret of the universe; the indirect outcome of his
yearning search for happiness, for some object of love that endured
amid the eternal flux, and in loving which he should find a perfect
and eternal joy. Riches, honor, the pleasures of sense--these held no
true and abiding bliss. The passion with which van den Ende's daughter
had agitated him had been wisely mastered, unavowed. But in the
Infinite Substance he had found the object of his search: the
necessary Eternal Being in and through whom all else existed, among
whose infinite attributes were thought and extension, that made up the
one poor universe known to man; whom man could love without desiring
to be loved in return, secure in the consciousness he was not outside
the Divine order. His book, he felt, would change theology to
theonomy, even as Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo had changed
astrology to astronomy. This chain of thoughts, forged link by link,
without rest, without hurry, as he sat grinding his glasses, day by
day, and year by year: these propositions, laboriously polished like
his telescope and microscope lenses, were no less designed for the
furtherance and clarification of human vision.
And yet not primarily vision. The first Jew to create an original
philosophy, he yet remained a Jew in aiming not at abstract knowledge,
but at concrete conduct: and was most of all a Jew in his proclamation
of the Unity. He would teach a world distraught and divided by
religious strife the higher path of spiritual blessedness; bring it
the Jewish greeting--Peace. But that he was typical--even by his very
isolation--of the race that had cast him out, he did not himself
perceive, missing by his static philosophy the sense of historical
enchainment, and continuous racial inspiration.
As, however, he glanced to-day over the pages of Part Three, "The
Origin and Nature of the Affects," he felt somehow out of tune with
this bloodless vivisection of human emotions, this chain of
quasi-mathematical propositions with their Euclidean array of data and
scholia, marshalling passions before the cold throne of intellect. The
exorcised image of Klaartje van den Ende--raised again by the
landlady's words--hovered amid the demonstrations. He caught gleams of
her between the steps. Her perfect Greek face flashed up and vanished
as in coquetry, her smile flickered. How learned she was, how wise,
how witty, how beautiful! And the instant he allowed himself to muse
thus, she appeared in full fascination, skating superbly on the frozen
canals, or smiling down at him from the ancient balustrade of the
window (surely young Gerard Dou must have caught an inspiration from
her as he passed by). What happy symposia at her father's house, when
the classic world was opening for the first time to the gaze of the
clogged Talmud-student, and the brilliant cynicism of the old doctor
combined with the larger outlook of his Christian fellow-pupils to
complete his emancipation from his native environment. After the dead
controversies of Hillel and Shammai in old Jerusalem, how freshening
these live discussions as to whether Holland should have sheltered
Charles Stuart from the regicide Cromwell, or whether the
_doelen-stuk_ of Rembrandt van Rijn were as well painted as Van
Ravosteyn's. In the Jewish quarter, though Rembrandt lived in it,
interest had been limited to the guldens earned by dirty old men in
sitting to him. What ardor, too, for the newest science, what worship
of Descartes and deprecation of the philosophers before him! And then
the flavor of romance--as of their own spices--wafted from the talk
about the new Colonies in the Indies! Good God! had it been so wise to
quench the glow of youth, to slip so silently to forty year? He had
allowed her to drop out of his life--this child so early grown to
winning womanhood--she was apparently dead for him, yet this sudden
idea of her proximity had revitalized her so triumphantly that the
philosopher wondered at the miracle, or at his own powers of
self-deception.
And who was this young man?
Had he analyzed love correctly? He turned to Proposition xxxiii. "If
we love a thing which is like ourselves we endeavor as much as
possible to make it love us in return." His eye ran over the proof
with its impressive summing-up. "Or in other words (Schol. Prop,
xiii., pt. 3), we try to make it love us in return." Unimpeachable
logic, but was it true? Had he tried to make Klaartje love him in
return? Not unless one counted the semi-conscious advances of
wit-combats and intellectual confidences as she grew up! But had he
succeeded? No, impossible, and his spirits fell, and mounted again to
note how truly their falling corroborated--by converse reasoning--his
next Proposition. "The greater the affect with which we imagine that a
beloved object is affected towards us, the greater will be our
self-exaltation," No, she had never given him cause for
self-exaltation, though occasionally it seemed as if she preferred his
talk to that of even the high-born, foppish youths sent by their sires
to sit at her father's feet.
In any case perhaps it was well he had given her maidenly modesty no
chance of confession. Marriage had never loomed as a possibility for
him--the life of the thinker must needs shrink from the complications
and prejudices engendered by domestic happiness: the intellectual love
of God more than replaced these terrestrial affections.
But now a sudden conviction that nothing could replace them, that they
were of the essence of personality, wrapped him round as with flame.
Some subtle aroma of emotion like the waft of the orange-groves of
Burgos in which his ancestors had wandered thrilled the son of the
mists and marshes. Perhaps it was only the conserve of red roses. At
any rate that was useless in this fever.
He took up his tools resolutely, but he could not work. He fell back
on his rough sketch for a lucid Algebra, but his lucid formulæ were a
blur. He went downstairs and played with the delighted children and
listened to the landlady's gossip, throwing her a word or two of
shrewd counsel on the everyday matters that came up. Presently he
asked her if the van den Endes had told her anything of their plans.
"Oh, they were going to stay at Scheveningen for the bathing. The
second time they came up from there."