Chapter X: Front Matter (10)

To the ethical aspect of his philosophy, Descartes, unlike Spinoza,
only devoted a subordinate attention. In a short treatise, however, he
discussed the relation of reason to the passions. After we have got
over the initial difficulty, that matter should give rise to effects
in mind, and mind in matter, and have admitted that in man the unity
of mind and body turns what in the animals is mere mechanical
reception of stimulus from without and reaction upon it into an action
and reaction mediated by sensation, emotion and passion, another
question presents itself. How can the mere natural movement of
passion, the nature of which is fixed by the original constitution of
our body, and of the things that act upon it, be altered or modified
by pure reason? For while it is obvious that morality consists in the
determination of reason by itself, it is not easy to conceive how the
same being who is determined by passion from without should also be
determined by reason from within. How, in other words, can a spiritual
being maintain its character as self-determined, or at least
determined only by the clear and distinct ideas of the reason which
are its innate forms, in the presence of this foreign element of
passion that seems to make it the slave of external impressions? Is
reason able to crush this intruder, or to turn it into a servant? Can
the passions be annihilated, or can they be spiritualized? Descartes
could not properly adopt either alternative; he could not adopt the
ethics of asceticism, for the union of body and mind is, in his view,
natural; and hence the passions which are the results of that union
are in themselves good. They are provisions of nature for the
protection of the unity of soul and body, and stimulate us to the acts
necessary for that purpose. Yet, on the other hand, he could not admit
that these passions are capable of being completely spiritualized; for
so long as the unity of body and soul is regarded as merely external
and accidental, it is impossible to think that the passions which
arise out of this unity can be transformed into the embodiment and
expression of reason.

Descartes, indeed, points out that every passion has a lower and a
higher form, and while in its lower or primary form it is based on the
obscure ideas produced by the motion of the animal spirits, in its
higher form it is connected with the clear and distinct judgments of
reason regarding good and evil. If, however, the unity of soul and
body be a unity of composition, there is an element of obscurity in
the judgments of passion which cannot be made clear, an element in
desire that cannot be spiritualized. If the mind be external to the
passions it can only impose upon them an external rule of moderation.
On such a theory no _ideal_ morality is possible to man in his present
state; for, in order to the attainment of such an ideal morality, it
would be necessary that the accidental element obtruded into his life
as a spiritual being by his connexion with the body should be
expelled. What can be attained under present conditions is only to
abstract so far as is possible from external things, and those
relations to external things into which passion brings us. Hence the
great importance which Descartes attaches to the distinction between
things in our power and things not in our power. What is not in our
power includes all outward things, and therefore it is our highest
wisdom to regard them as determined by an absolute fate, or the
eternal decree of God. We cease to wish for the impossible; and
therefore to subdue our passions we only need to convince ourselves
that no effort of ours can enable us to secure their objects. On the
other hand, that which is within our power, and which, therefore, we
cannot desire too earnestly, is virtue. But virtue in this abstraction
from all objects of desire is simply the harmony of reason with
itself, the [Greek: ataraxia] of the Stoic under a slight change of
aspect. Thus in ethics, as in metaphysics, Descartes ends not with a
reconciliation of the opposed elements, but with a dualism, or at
best, with a unity which is the result of abstraction.

_The Philosophy of Malebranche._--Malebranche was prepared, by the ascetic training of the cloister and the teaching of Augustine, to bring to clear consciousness and expression many of the tendencies that were latent and undeveloped in the philosophy of Descartes. To use a chemical metaphor, the Christian Platonism of the church father was a medium in which Cartesianism could precipitate the product of its elements. Yet the medium was, as we shall see, not a perfect one, and hence the product was not quite pure. Without metaphor, Malebranche, by his previous habits of thought, was well fitted to detect and develop the pantheistic and ascetic elements of his master's philosophy. But he was not well fitted to penetrate through the veil of popular language under which the discordance of that philosophy with orthodox Christianity was hidden. On the contrary, the whole training of the Catholic priest, and especially his practical spirit, with that tendency to compromise which a practical spirit always brings with it, enabled him to conceal from himself as well as from others the logical result of his principles. And we do not wonder even when we find him treating as a "miserable" the philosopher who tore away the veil.

Malebranche saw "_all things in God._" In other words, he taught that knowledge is possible only in so far as thought is the expression, not of the nature of the individual subject as such, but of a universal life in which he and all other rational beings partake. "No one can feel my individual pain; every one can see the truth which I contemplate--why is it so? The reason is that my pain is a modification of my substance, but truth is the common good of all spirits."[16] This idea is ever present to Malebranche, and is repeated by him in an endless variety of forms of expression. Thus, like Descartes, but with more decision, he tells us that the idea of the infinite is prior to the idea of the finite. "We conceive of the infinite being by the very fact that we conceive of being without thinking whether it be finite or no. But in order that we may think of a finite being, we must necessarily cut off or deduct something from the general notion of being, which consequently we must previously possess. Thus the mind does not apprehend anything whatever, except in and through the idea that it has of the infinite; and so far is it from being the case that this idea is formed by the confused assemblage of all the ideas of particular things as the philosophers maintain, that, on the contrary, all these particular ideas are only participations in the general idea of the infinite, just as God does not derive his being from the creatures, but all the creatures are imperfect participations of the divine Being."[17] Again, he tells us, in the same chapter, that "when we wish to think of any particular thing, we first cast our view upon all being, and then apply it to the consideration of the object in question. We could not desire to see any particular object unless we saw it already in a confused and general way, and as there is nothing which we cannot desire to see, so all objects must be in a manner present to our spirit." Or, as he puts it in another place, "our mind would not be capable of representing to itself the general ideas of genera and species if it did not see all things as contained in one; for every creature being an individual we cannot say that we are apprehending any created thing when we think the general idea of a triangle."

Relation of the Divine mind to human knowledge.

The main idea that is expressed in all these different ways is simply
this, that to determine any individual object as such, we must relate
it to, and distinguish it from, the whole of which it is a part; and
that, therefore, thought could never apprehend anything if it did not
bring with itself the idea of the intelligible world as a unity.
Descartes had already expressed this truth in his _Meditations_, but
he had deprived it of its full significance by making a distinction
between the being and the idea of God, the former of which, in his
view, was only the cause of the latter. Malebranche detects this
error, and denies that there is any idea of the infinite, which is a
somewhat crude way of saying that there is no division between the
idea of the infinite and its reality. What Reid asserted of the
external world, that it is not represented by an idea in our minds,
but is actually present to them, Malebranche asserted of God. No
individual thing, he tells us--and an idea is but an individual
thing--could represent the infinite. On the contrary, all individual
things are represented through the infinite Being, who contains them
all in his substance "tres efficace, et par consequence tres
intelligible."[18] We know God by himself, material things only by
their ideas in God, for they are "unintelligible in themselves, and we
can see them only in the being who contains them in an intelligible
manner." And thus, unless we in some way "saw God, we should be able
to see nothing else." The vision _of_ God or _in_ God, therefore, is
an "intellectual intuition" in which seer and seen, knower and known,
are one. Our knowledge of things is our participation in God's
knowledge of them.

When we have gone so far with Malebranche, we are tempted to ask why
he does not follow out his thought to its natural conclusion. If the
idea of God is not separable from his existence, if it is through the
idea of him that all things are known, and through his existence that
all things are, then it would seem necessarily to follow that our
consciousness of God is but a part of God's consciousness of himself,
that our consciousness of self and other things is but God's
consciousness of them, and lastly, that there is no existence either
of ourselves or other things except in this consciousness. To
understand Malebranche is mainly to understand how he stopped short of
results that seemed to lie so directly in the line of his thought.

To begin with the last point, it is easy to see that Malebranche only
asserts unity of idea and reality in God, to deny it everywhere else,
which with him is equivalent to asserting it in general and denying it
in particular. To him, as to Descartes, the opposition between mind
and matter is absolute. Material things cannot come into our minds nor
can our minds go out of themselves "pour se promener dans les
cieux."[19] Hence they are in themselves absolutely unknown; they are
known only in God, in whom are their ideas, and as these ideas again
are quite distinct from the reality, they "might be presented to the
mind without anything existing." That they exist _out_ of God in
another manner than the intelligible manner of their existence _in_
God, is explained by a mere act of His will, that is, it is not
explained at all. Though we see all things in God, therefore, there is
no connexion between his existence and theirs. The "world is not a
necessary emanation of divinity; God is perfectly self-sufficient, and
the idea of the infinitely perfect Being can be conceived quite apart
from any other. The existence of the creatures is due to the free
decrees of God."[20] Malebranche, therefore, still treats of external
things as "things in themselves," which have an existence apart from
thought, even the divine thought, though it is only in and through the
divine thought they can be known by us. "To see the material world, or
rather to judge that it exists (since in itself it is invisible), it
is necessary that God should reveal it to us, for we cannot see the
result of his arbitrary will through necessary reason."[21]

But if we know external things only through their idea in God, how do
we know ourselves? Is it also through the idea of us in God? Here we
come upon a point in which Malebranche diverges very far from his
master. We do not, he says, properly _know_ ourselves at all as we
know God or even external objects. We are conscious of ourselves by
inner sense (_sentiment interieur_), and from this we know _that_ we
are, but we do not know _what_ we are. "We know the existence of our
soul more distinctly than of our body, but we have not so perfect a
knowledge of our soul as of our body." This is shown by the fact that
from our idea of body as extended substance, we can at once see what
are its possible modifications. In other words, we only need the idea
of extended substance to see that there is an inexhaustible number of
figures and motions of which it is capable. The whole of geometry is
but a development of what is given already in the conception of
extension. But it is not so with our consciousness of self, which does
not enable us to say prior to actual experience what sensations or
passions are possible to us. We only know what heat, cold, light,
colour, hunger, anger and desire are by feeling them. Our knowledge
extends as far as our experience and no further. Nay, we have good
reason to believe that many of these modifications exist in our soul
only by reason of its accidental association with a body, and that if
it were freed from that body it would be capable of far other and
higher experiences. "We know by feeling that our soul is great, but
perhaps we know almost nothing of what it is in itself." The
informations of sense have, as Descartes taught, only a practical but
no theoretical value; they tell us nothing of the external world, the
real nature of which We know not through touch and taste and sight,
but only through our idea of extended substances; while of the nature
of the soul they do not tell us much more than that it exists and that
it is not material. And in this latter case we have no idea, nothing
better than sense to raise us above its illusions. It is clear from
these statements that by self-consciousness Malebranche means
consciousness of desires and feelings, which belong to the individual
as such, and not consciousness of self as thinking. He begins, in
fact, where Descartes ended, and identifies the consciousness of self
as thinking, and so transcending the limits of its own particular
being, with the consciousness or idea of God. And between the
consciousness of the finite in sense and the consciousness of the
infinite in thought, or in other words, between the consciousness of
the universal and the consciousness of the individual, he sees no
connexion. Malebranche is just one step from the pantheistic
conclusion that the consciousness of finite individuality as such is
illusory, and that as all bodies are but modes of one infinite
extension, so all souls are but modes of one infinite thought. But
while he willingly accepts this result in regard to matter, his
religious feelings prevent him from accepting it in relation to mind.
He is driven, therefore, to the inconsistency of holding that sense
and feeling, through which in his view we apprehend the finite as
such, give us true though imperfect knowledge of the soul, while the
knowledge they give us of body is not only imperfect but false.[22]
Thus the finite spirit is still allowed to be a substance, distinct
from the infinite, though it holds its substantial existence on a
precarious tenure. It is left hanging, we may say, on the verge of the
infinite, whose attraction must soon prove too strong for it. Ideas
are living things, and often remould the minds that admit them in
spite of the greatest resistance of dead custom and traditionary
belief. In the grasp of a logic that overpowers him the more easily in
that he is unconscious of its tendency. Malebranche is brought within
one step of the pantheistic conclusion, and all his Christian feeling
and priestly training can do is _just_ to save him from denial of the
personality of man.

But even this denial is not the last word of pantheism. When the
principle that the finite is known only in relation to the infinite,
the individual only in relation to the universal, is interpreted as
meaning that the infinite and universal is complete in itself without
the finite and individual, when the finite and individual is treated
as a mere accidental existence due to the "arbitrary will of God," it
ceases to be possible to conceive even God as a spirit. Did
Malebranche realize what he was saying when he declared that God was
"being in general," but not any particular being? At any rate we can
see that the same logic that leads him almost to deny the reality of
finite beings, leads him also to seek the divine nature in something
more abstract and general even than thought. If we must abstract from
all relation to the finite in order to know God as he is, is it not
necessary for us also to abstract from self-consciousness, for
self-consciousness has a negative element in it that is something
definite, and therefore limited? We do not wonder, therefore, when we
find Malebranche saying that reason does not tell us that God is a
spirit, but only that he is an infinitely perfect being, and that he
must be conceived rather as a spirit than as a body simply because
spirit is more perfect than body. "When we call God a spirit, it is
not so much to show positively what he is, as to signify that he is
not material." But as we ought not to give him a bodily form like
man's, so we ought not to think of his spirit as similar to our own
spirits, although we can conceive nothing more perfect. "It is
necessary rather to believe that as he contains in himself the
properties of matter without being material, so he comprehends in
himself the perfections of created spirits without being a spirit as
we alone can conceive spirits, and that his true name is 'He who is,'
i.e. Being without restriction, Being infinite and universal."[23]
Thus the essentially self-revealing God of Christianity gives way to
pure spirit, and pure spirit in its turn to the eternal and
incomprehensible substance of which we can say nothing but that it is.
The divine substance contains in it, indeed, everything that is in
creation, but it contains them _eminenter_ in some incomprehensible
form that is reconcilable with its infinitude. But we have no adequate
name by which to call it except Being. The curious metaphysic of
theology by which, in his later writings, Malebranche tried to make
room for the incarnation by supposing that the finite creation, which
_as_ finite is unworthy of God, was made worthy by union with Christ,
the divine Word, shows that Malebranche had some indistinct sense of
the necessity of reconciling his philosophy with his theology; but it
shows also the necessarily artificial nature of the combination. The
result of the union of such incongruous elements was something which
the theologians at once recognised as heterodox and the philosophers
as illogical.

There was another doctrine of Malebranche which brought him into
trouble with the theologians, and which was the main subject of his
long controversy with Arnauld. This was his denial of particular
providence. As Leibnitz maintained that this is the best of all
possible worlds, and that its evils are to be explained by the
negative nature of the finite, so Malebranche, with a slight change of
expression derived evil from the nature of particular or individual
existence. It is not conformable to the nature of God to act by any
but universal laws, and these universal laws necessarily involve
particular evil consequences, though their ultimate result is the
highest possible good. The question why there should be any particular
existence, any existence but God, seeing such existence necessarily
involves evil, remains insoluble so long as the purely pantheistic
view of God is maintained; and it is this view which is really at the
bottom of the assertion that he can have no particular volitions. To
the coarse and anthropomorphic conception of particular providence
Malebranche may be right in objecting, but on the other hand, it
cannot be doubted that any theory in which the universal is absolutely
opposed to the particular, the infinite to the finite, is unchristian
as well as unphilosophical. For under this dualistic presupposition,
there seem to be only two possible alternatives open to thought:
either the particular and finite must be treated as something
independent of the universal and infinite, which involves an obvious
contradiction, or else it must be regarded as absolute nonentity. We
find Malebranche doing the one or the other as occasion requires. Thus
he vindicates the freedom of man's will on the ground that the
universal will of God does not completely determine the particular
volitions of man; and then becoming conscious of the difficulty
involved in this conception, he tries, like Descartes, to explain the
particular will as something merely negative, a defect, and not a
positive existence.

Reason and will.

But to understand fully Malebranche's view of freedom and the ethical
system connected with it, we must notice an important alteration which
he makes in the Cartesian theory of the relation of will and
intelligence. To Descartes, as we have seen, the ultimate essence of
mind lay in pure abstract self-determination or will, and hence he
based even moral and intellectual truth on the arbitrary decrees of
God. With Malebranche, on the other hand, abstraction goes a step
further; and the absolute is sought not in the subject as opposed to
the object, not in pure formal self-determination as opposed to that
which is determined, but in a unity that transcends this difference.
With him, therefore, will ceases to be regarded as the essence of
intelligence, and sinks into a property or separable attribute of it.
As we can conceive an extended substance without actual movement, so,
he says, we can conceive a thinking substance without actual volition.
But "matter or extension without motion would be entirely useless and
incapable of that variety of forms for which it is made; and we
cannot, therefore, suppose, that an all-wise Being would create it in
this way. In like manner, if a spiritual or thinking substance were
without will, it is clear that it would be quite useless, for it would
not be attracted towards the objects of its perception, and would not
love the good for which it is made. We cannot therefore conceive an
intelligent being so to fashion it."[24] Now God need not be conceived
as creating at all, for he is self-sufficient; but if he be a creator
of spirits, he must create them for himself. "God cannot will that
there should exist a spirit that does not love him, or that loves him
less than any other good."[25] The craving for good in general, for an
absolute satisfaction, is a _natural_ love of God that is common to
all. "The just, the wicked, the blessed, and the damned all alike love
God with this love." Out of this love of God arises the love we have
to ourselves and to others, which are the _natural inclinations_ that
belong to all created spirits. For these inclinations are but the
elements of the love which is in God, and which therefore he inspires
in all his creatures. "Il s'aime, il nous aime, il aime toutes ses
creatures; il ne fait donc point d'esprits qu'il ne les porte a
l'aimer, a s'aimer, et a aimer toutes les creatures."[26] Stripping
this thought of its theological vesture, what is expressed here is
simply that as a spiritual being each man is conscious of his own
limited and individual existence, as well as of the limited and
individual existence of other beings like himself, only in relation to
the whole in which they are parts, so he can find his own good only in
the good of the whole, and he is in contradiction with himself so long
as he rests in any good short of that. His love of happiness, his
natural inclinations both selfish and social, may be therefore
regarded as an undeveloped form of the love of God; and the ideal
state of his inclinations is that in which the love of self and of
others are explicitly referred to that higher affection, or in which
his love does not proceed from a part to the whole, but from the whole
to the parts.

Ethics.

The question of morals to Malebranche is the question how these
_natural inclinations_ are related to the particular passions.
Sensation and passion arise out of the connexion of body and soul, and
their use is only to urge us to attend to the wants of the former. We
can scarcely hear without a smile the simple monastic legend which
Malebranche weaves together about the original nature of the passions
and their alteration by the Fall. "It is visibly a disorder that a
spirit capable of knowing and loving God should be obliged to occupy
itself with the needs of the body." "A being altogether occupied with
what passes in his body and with the infinity of objects that surround
it cannot be thinking on the things that are truly good."[27] Hence
the necessity of an immediate and instinctive warning from the senses
in regard to the relations of things to our organism, and also of
pains and pleasures which may induce us to attend to this warning.
"Sensible pleasure is the mark that nature has attached to the use of
certain things in order that without having the trouble of examining
them by reason, we may employ them for the preservation of the body,
but not in order that we may love them."[28] Till the Fall the mind
was merely united to the body, not subjected to it, and the influence
of these pleasures and pains was only such as to make men attend to
their bodily wants, but not to occupy the mind, or fill it with
sensuous joys and sorrows, or trouble its contemplation of that which
is really good. Our moral aim should therefore be to restore this
state of things, to weaken our union with the body and strengthen our
union with God. And to encourage us in pursuing this aim we have to
remember that union with God is natural to the spirit, and that, while
even the condition of union with the body is artificial, the condition
of subjection to the body is wholly unnatural to it. Our primary
tendency is towards the supreme good, and we only love the objects of
our passions in so far as we "determine towards particular, and
therefore false goods, the love that God gives us for himself." The
search for happiness is really the search for God in disguise, and
even the levity and inconstancy with which men rush from one finite
good to another, is a proof that they were made for the infinite.
Furthermore, this natural love of God, or inclination for good in
general, "gives us the power of suspending our consent in regard to
those particular goods which do not satisfy it."[29] If we refuse to
be led by the obscure and confused voice of instinctive feeling, which
arises from and always tends to confirm our union with the body, and
wait for the light of reason which arises from and always tends to
confirm our union with God, we have done all that is in our power, the
rest is God's work. "If we only judge precisely of that which we see
clearly, we shall never be deceived. For then it will not be we that
judge, but the universal reason that judges in us."[30] And as our
love, even of particular goods, is a confused love of the supreme
good, so the clear vision of God inevitably brings with it the love of
him. "We needs must love the highest when we see it." When it is the
divine reason that speaks in us it is the divine love that moves us,
"the same love wherewith God loves himself and the things he has
made."[31]

The general result of the ethics of Malebranche is ascetic. The
passions, like the senses, have no relation to the higher life of the
soul; their value is only in relation to the union of soul and body, a
union which is purely accidental or due to the arbitrary will of God.
The more silently they discharge their provisional function, and the
less they disturb or interfere with the pure activity of spirit, the
more nearly they approach to the only perfection that is possible for
them. Their ideal state is to remain or become again simple instincts
that act mechanically like the circulation of the blood. Universal
light of reason casts no ray into the obscurity of sense; its
universal love cannot embrace any of the objects of particular
passion. It is indeed recognized by Malebranche that sensation in man
is mixed with thought, that the passions in him are forms of the love
of good in general. But this union of the rational with the sensuous
nature is regarded merely as a confusion which is to be cleared up,
_not_ in a higher unity of the two elements, but simply by the
withdrawal of the spirit from contact with that which darkens and
defiles it. Of a transformation of sense into thought, of passion into
duty--an elevation of the life of sense till it becomes the embodiment
and expression of the life of reason--Malebranche has no conception.
Hence the life of reason turns with him to mysticism in theory and to
asceticism in practice. His universal is abstract and opposed to the
particular; instead of explaining it, it explains it away.

A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we
view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not
at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to
the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and
not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche
conceived himself to be presenting to the world only the purest and
most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. But if we
obey his own continual advice to think clearly and distinctly, if we
divest his system of all the sensuous and imaginative forms in which
he has clothed it, and reduce it to the naked simplicity of its
central thought, what we find is not a God that reveals himself in the
finite, and to the finite, but the absolute substance which has no
revelation, and whose existence is the negation of all but itself.
Thus to tear away the veil, however, there was needed a stronger,
simpler, and freer spirit--a spirit less influenced by opinion, less
inclined to practical compromise, and gifted with a stronger "faith in
the whispers of the lonely muse" of speculation than Malebranche.

_The Philosophy of Spinoza._--It is a remark of Hegel's that Spinoza, as a Jew, first brought into European thought the idea of an absolute unity in which the difference of finite and infinite is lost. Some later writers have gone further, and attempted to show that the main doctrines by which his philosophy is distinguished from that of Descartes were due to the direct influences of Jewish writers like Maimonides, Gersonides, and Hasdai Crescas, rather than to the necessary development of Cartesian ideas. And it is undoubtedly true that many points of similarity with such writers, reaching down even to verbal coincidence, may be detected in the works of Spinoza, although it is not so easy to determine how much he owed to their teaching. His own view of his obligations is sufficiently indicated by the fact, that while in his ethics he carries on a continual polemic against Descartes, and strives at every point to show that his own doctrines are legitimately derived from Cartesian principles, he only once refers to Jewish philosophy as containing an obscure and unreasoned anticipation of these doctrines. "Quod quidam Hebraeorum quasi per nebulam vidisse videntur qui scilicet statuunt Deum Dei intellectum resque ab ipso intellectas unum et idem esse."[32] It may be that the undeveloped pantheism and rationalism of the Jewish philosophers had a deeper influence than he himself was aware of, in emancipating him from the traditions of the synagogue, and giving to his mind its first philosophical bias. In his earlier work there are Neoplatonic ideas and expressions which in the _Ethics_ are rejected or remoulded into a form more suitable to the spirit of Cartesianism. But the question, after all, has little more than a biographical interest. In the Spinozistic philosophy there are few differences from Descartes which cannot be traced to the necessary development of Cartesian principles; and the comparison of Malebranche shows that a similar development might take place under the most diverse intellectual conditions. What is most remarkable in Spinoza is just the freedom and security with which these principles are followed out to their last result. His Jewish origin and his breach with Judaism completely isolated him from every influence but that of the thought that possesses him. And no scruple or hesitation, no respect for the institutions or feelings of his time interferes with his speculative consequence. He exhibits to us the almost perfect type of a mind without superstitions, which has freed itself from all but reasoned and intelligent convictions, or, in the Cartesian phrase, "clear and distinct ideas"; and when he fails, it is not by any inconsistency, or arbitrary stopping short of the necessary conclusions of his logic, but by the essential defect of his principles.

Geometrical method applied to metaphysics.

Spinoza takes his idea of method from mathematics, and after the
manner of Euclid, places at the head of each book of his _Ethics_ a
certain number of definitions, axioms, and postulates which are
supposed to be intuitively certain, and to form a sufficient basis for
all that follows. Altogether there are twenty-seven definitions,
twenty axioms, and eight postulates. If Spinoza is regarded as the
most consequent of philosophers it cannot be because he has based his
system upon so many fragmentary views of truth; it must be because a
deeper unity has been discerned in the system than is visible on the
first aspect of it. We must, therefore, to a certain extent
distinguish between the form and the matter of his thought, though it
is also true that the defective form itself involves a defect in the
matter.

What in the first instance recommends the geometrical method to
Spinoza is, not only its apparent exactness and the necessity of its
sequence, but, so to speak, its disinterestedness. Confusion of
thought arises from the fact that we put ourselves, our desires and
feelings and interests, into our view of things; that we do not regard
them as they are in themselves, in their essential nature, but look
for some final cause, that is, some relation to ourselves by which
they may be explained. For this reason, he says, "the truth might for
ever have remained hid from the human race, if mathematics, which
looks not to the final cause of figures, but to their essential nature
and the properties involved in it, had not set another type of
knowledge before them." To understand things is to see how all that is
true of them flows from the clear and distinct idea expressed in their
definition, and ultimately, it is to see how all truth flows from the
_essentia Dei_ as all geometrical truth flows from the idea of
quantity. To take a mathematical view of the universe, therefore, is
to raise ourselves above all consideration of the end or tendency of
things, above the fears and hopes of mortality into the region of
truth and necessity. "When I turned my mind to this subject," he says
in the beginning of his treatise on politics, "I did not propose to
myself any novel or strange aim, but simply to demonstrate by certain
and indubitable reason those things which agree best with practice.
And in order that I might inquire into the matters of this science
with the same freedom of mind with which we are wont to treat lines
and surfaces in mathematics, I determined not to laugh or to weep over
the actions of men, but simply to understand them; and to contemplate
their affections and passions, such as love, hate, anger, envy,
arrogance, pity and all other disturbances of soul not as vices of
human nature, but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as
heat, cold, storm, thunder pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.
For these, though troublesome, are yet necessary, and have certain
causes through which we may come to understand them, and thus, by
contemplating them in their truth, gain for our minds as much joy as
by the knowledge of things that are pleasing to the senses." All our
errors as to the nature of things arise from our judging them from the
point of view of the part and not of the whole, from appoint of view
determined by their relation to our own individual being, and not from
a point of view determined by the nature of the things themselves; or,
to put the same thing in another way, from the point of view of sense
and imagination, and not from the point of view of intelligence.
Mathematics shows us the inadequacy of such knowledge when it takes us
out of ourselves into things, and when it presents these things to us
as objects of universal intelligence apart from all special relation
to our individual feelings. And Spinoza only wishes that the same
universality and freedom of thought which belongs to mathematics,
because its objects _do not_ interest the passions, should be extended
to those objects that _do_ interest them. Purity from interest is the
first condition of the philosopher's being; he must get beyond the
illusion of sense and passion that makes our own lives so supremely
important and interesting to us simply because they are our own. He
must look at the present as it were through an inverted telescope of
reason, that will reduce it to its due proportion and place in the sum
of things. To the heat of passion and the higher heat of imagination,
Spinoza has only one advice--"Acquaint yourself with God and be at
peace." Look not to the particular but to the universal, view things
not under the form of the finite and temporal, but _sub quadam specie
aeternitatis._

Sense the source of error.

The illusion of the finite--the illusion of sense, imagination and
passion, which, in Bacon's language, tends to make men judge of things
_ex analogia hominis_ and not _ex analogia universi_, which raises the
individual life, and even the present moment of the individual life,
with its passing feelings, into the standard for measuring the
universe--this, in the eyes of Spinoza, is the source of all error and
evil to man. On the other hand, his highest good is to live the
universal life of reason, or what is the same thing, to view all
things from their centre in God, and to be moved only by the passion
for good in general, "the intellectual love of God." In the treatise
_De Emendatione Intellectus_, Spinoza takes up this contrast in the
first instance from its moral side. "All our felicity or infelicity is
founded on the nature of the object to which we are joined by love."
To love the things that perish is to be in continual trouble and
disturbance of passion; it is to be full of envy and hatred towards
others who possess them; it is to be ever striving after that which,
when we attain it, does not satisfy us; or lamenting over the loss of
that which inevitably passes away from us; only "love to an object
that is infinite and eternal feeds the soul with a changeless and
unmingled joy." But again our love rests upon our knowledge; if we saw
things as they really are we should love only the highest object. It
is because sense and imagination give to the finite an independence
and substantiality that do not belong to it, that we waste our love
upon it as if it were infinite. And as the first step towards truth is
to understand our error, so Spinoza proceeds to explain the defects of
common sense, or in other words, of that first and unreflected view of
the world which he, like Plato, calls opinion. Opinion is a kind of
knowledge derived partly from hearsay, and partly from _experientia
vaga_. It consists of vague and general conceptions of things, got
either from the report of others or from an experience which has not
received any special direction from intelligence. The mind that has
not got beyond the stage of opinion takes things as they present
themselves in its individual experience; and its beliefs grow up by
association of whatever happens to have been found together in that
experience. And as the combining principle of the elements of opinion
is individual and not universal, so its conception of the world is at
once fragmentary and accidental. It does not see things in their
connexion with the unity of the whole, and hence it cannot see them in
their true relation to each other. "I assert expressly," says Spinoza,
"that the mind has no adequate conception either of itself or of
external things, but only a confused knowledge of them, so long as it
perceives them only in the common order of nature, i.e. so long as it
is _externally determined_ to contemplate this or that object by the
accidental concourse of things, and so long as it is not _internally_
determined by the unity of thought in which it considers a number of
things to understand their agreements, differences and
contradictions."[33]

Vices of abstraction and imagination.

There are two kinds of errors which are usually supposed to exclude
each other, but which Spinoza finds to be united in opinion. These are
the errors of abstraction and imagination; the former explains its
vice by defect, the latter its vice by excess. On the one hand,
opinion is abstract and one-sided; it is defective in knowledge and
takes hold of things only at one point. On the other hand, and just
because of this abstractness and one-sidedness, it is forced to give
an artificial completeness and independence to that which is
essentially fragmentary and dependent. The word "abstract" is
misleading, in so far as we are wont to associate with abstraction the
idea of a mental effort by which parts are separated from a given
whole; but it may be applied without violence to any imperfect
conception, in which things that are really elements of a greater
whole are treated as if they were _res completae_, independent
objects, complete in themselves. And in this sense the ordinary
consciousness of man is often the victim of abstractions when it
supposes itself most of all to be dealing with realities. The essences
and substances of the schoolman may delude him, but he cannot think
these notions clearly without seeing that they are only abstract
elements of reality, and that they have a meaning only in relation to
the other elements of it. But common sense remains unconscious of its
abstractness because imagination gives a kind of substantiality to the
fragmentary and limited, and so makes it possible to conceive it as an
independent reality. Pure intelligence seeing the part as it is in
itself could never see it but as a part. Thought, when it rises to
clearness and distinctness in regard to any finite object, must at
once discern its relation to other finite objects and to the
whole,--must discern, in Spinozistic language, that it is "modal" and
not "real." But though it is not possible to _think_ the part as a
whole it is possible to picture it as a whole. The limited image that
fills the mind's eye seems to need nothing else for its reality. We
cannot think a house clearly and distinctly in all the connexion of
its parts with each other without seeing its necessary relation to the
earth on which it stands, to the pressure of the atmosphere, &c. The
very circumstances by which the possibility of such an existence is
explained make it impossible to conceive it apart from other things.
But nothing hinders me from resting on a house as a complete picture
by itself. Imagination represents things in the externality of space
and time, and is subjected to no other conditions but those of space
and time. Hence it can begin anywhere and stop anywhere. For the same
cause it can mingle and confuse together all manner of inconsistent
forms--can imagine a man with a horse's head, a candle blazing in
vacuo, a speaking tree, a man changed into an animal. There may be
elements in the nature of these things that would prevent such
combinations; but these elements are not necessarily present to the
ordinary consciousness, the abstractness of whose conceptions leaves
it absolutely at the mercy of imagination or accidental association.
To thought in this stage anything is possible that can be pictured.
On the other hand, as knowledge advances, this freedom of combination
becomes limited, "the less the mind understands and the more it
perceives the greater is its power of fiction, and the more it
understands the narrower is the limitation of that power. For just as
in the moment of consciousness we cannot imagine that we do not think,
so after we have apprehended the nature of body we cannot conceive of
a fly of infinite size, and after we know the nature of a soul we
cannot think of it as a square, though we may use the words that
express these ideas."[34] Thus, according to Spinoza, the range of
possibility narrows as knowledge widens, until to perfected knowledge
posibility is lost in necessity.

Insufficiency of the individual.

From these considerations it follows that all thought is imperfect
that stops short of the absolute unity of all things. Our first
imperfect notion of things as isolated from each other, or connected
only by co-existence and succession, is a mere imagination of things.
It is a fictitious substantiation of isolated moments in the eternal
Being. Knowledge, so far as it deals with the finite, is engaged in a
continual process of self-correction which can never be completed, for
at every step there is an element of falsity, in so far as the mind
rests in the contemplation of a certain number of the elements of the
world, as if they constituted a complete whole by themselves, whereas
they are only a part, the conception of which has to be modified at
the next step of considering its relation to the other parts. Thus we
rise from individuals of the first to individuals of the second order,
and we cannot stop short of the idea of "all nature as one individual
whose parts vary through an infinite number of modes, without change
of the whole individual."[35] At first we think of pieces of matter as
independent individuals, either because we can picture them
separately, or because they preserve a certain proportion or relation
of parts through their changes. But on further consideration, these
apparent substances sink into modes, each of which is dependent on all
the others. All nature is bound together by necessary law, and not an
atom could be other than it is without the change of the whole world.
Hence it is only in the whole world that there is any true
individuality or substance. And the same principle applies to the
minds of men. Their individuality is a mere semblance caused by our
abstraction from their conditions. Isolate the individual man, and he
will not display the character of a thinking being at all. His whole
spiritual life is bound up with his relations to other minds, past and
present. He has such a life, only in and through that universal life
of which he is so infinitesimal a part that his own contribution to it
is as good as nothing. "Vis qua homo in existendo perseverat limitata
est, et a potentia causarum externarum infinite superatur."[36] What
can be called his own? His body is a link in a cyclical chain of
movement which involves all the matter of the world, and which as a
whole remains without change through all. His mind is a link in a
great movement of thought, which makes him the momentary organ and
expression of one of its phases. His very consciousness of self is
marred by a false abstraction, above which he must rise ere he can
know himself as he really is.

"Let us imagine," says Spinoza in his fifteenth letter, "a little worm
living in blood which has vision enough to discern the particles of
blood, lymph, &c., and reason enough to observe how one particle is
repelled by another with which it comes into contact, or communicates
a part of its motion to it. Such a worm would live in the blood as we
do in this part of the universe, and would regard each particle of it,
not as a part, but as a whole, nor could it know how all the parts are
influenced by the universal nature of the blood, and are obliged to
accommodate themselves to each other as is required by that nature, so
that they co-operate together according to a fixed law. For if we
suppose that there are no causes outside of the blood which could
communicate new motions to it, and no space beyond the blood, nor any
other bodies to which its particles could transfer their motion, it is
certain that the blood as a whole would always maintain its present
state, and its particles would suffer no other variations than those
which may be inferred from the given relation of the motion of the
blood to lymph, chyle, &c. And thus in that case the blood would
require to be considered always as a whole and not as a part. But
since there are many other causes which influence the laws of the
nature of blood, and are in turn influenced thereby, other motions and
other variations must arise in the blood which are not due to the
proportion of motion in its constituents but also to the relation
between that motion and external causes. And therefore we cannot
consider the blood as a whole, but only as a part of a greater whole."

"Now we can think, and indeed ought to think, of all natural bodies in
the same manner in which we have thought of this blood, for all bodies
are surrounded by other bodies, and reciprocally determine and are
determined by them, to exist and operate in a fixed and definite way,
so as to preserve the same ratio of motion and rest in the whole
universe. Hence it follows that every body, in so far as it exists
under a certain definite modification, ought to be considered as
merely a part of the whole universe which agrees with its whole, and
thereby is in intimate union with all the other parts; and since the
nature of the universe is not limited like that of the blood, but
absolutely infinite, it is clear that by this nature, with its
infinite powers, the parts are modified in an infinite number of ways,
and compelled to pass through an infinity of variations. Moreover,
when I think of the universe as a substance, I conceive of a still
closer union of each part with the whole; for, as I have elsewhere
shown, it is the nature of substance to be infinite, and therefore
every single part belongs to the nature of the corporeal substance, so
that apart therefrom it neither can exist nor be conceived. And as to
the human mind, I think of it also as of part of nature, for I think
of nature as having in it an infinite power of thinking, which, as
infinite, contains in itself the idea of all nature, and whose
thoughts run parallel with all existence."

The whole dominates the parts.