Chapter XI: Front Matter (11)

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.

Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether they were trying to do better--whether, at any rate, they were endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them. But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose, covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we do we should consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn us; for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The _devoir_ of a knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants, we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,--that they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives,--unless this is set before them as _the_ thing which they are to do, and _can_ succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for God, they will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought. The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person, to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one remedy which will avail--that the thing which we call public opinion learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect money, we respect rank, we respect ability--character is as if it had no existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter. Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of our material splendour an advance of the race.

In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present, creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this difficulty solved--suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the universe--the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] _Westminster Review_, 1853.

[H] 1. _Die poetischen Bücher des Alten Bundes._ Erklärt von Heinrich Ewald. Göttingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.

2. _Kurz gefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament._ Zweite Lieferung. _Hiob._ Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.

3. _Quæstionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen._ Von D. Hermannus
Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.

[I] Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed.

[J] See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.

[K] An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between heaven and earth.

[L] The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and God's appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled' against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job, because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the _Theodice_, such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he lived.

[M] See the Thirteenth Article.

SPINOZA.[N]

_Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politicum._ Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halæ ad Salam. J. F. Lippert. 1852.

This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'

The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his character--that, except so far as his opinions were blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of such a man,--a lesson which he taught equally by example and in word,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful language,--'Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum veræ fidei Catholicæ signum est, et veri Spiritûs Sancti fructus: et ubicumque hæc reperiuntur, ibi Christus re verâ est, et ubicumque hæc desunt deest Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiæ et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men. Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either the points of disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance--or there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant under a difference of words--or else the real truth is something different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is representing some important element which the others ignore or forget. In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success; Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effect upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself thoroughly understood.

And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott trunkner Mann_--a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are. With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione Intellectûs.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to epitomise it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these _veræ ideæ_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious and Platonic.

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one, and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these, he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything, and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four.

We know a thing--

1. i. _Ex mero auditu_: because we have heard it from some
person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to
question.

ii. _Ab experientiâ vagâ_: from general experience: for
instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through
our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we
are ignorant.

2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the laws
of its phenomena, and see them following in their
sequence in the order of nature.

3. Finally, we know a thing, _ex scientiâ intuitivâ_, which
alone is absolutely clear and certain.

To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not understand it.

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.

A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very simplest truths, _non nisi simplicissimæ veritates_, can be perceived; but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and the true ideas, the _veræ ideæ_, which are apprehended by this faculty of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.' All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est præter ipsam essentiam objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum veritatis quærere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiæ objectivæ rerum, aut ideæ (omnia illa idem significant) debito ordine quærantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)

Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say _is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We are to see, however, what these _ideæ_ are which are offered to us as self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them, in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_, and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to 'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--

DEFINITIONS.

1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing
the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which
cannot be conceived except as existing.

2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by
another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is
called finite, because we can always conceive another body
enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by
body.

3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by
itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the
conception of anything else as the cause of it.

4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance
as constituting the essence of substance.

5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in
something else, by and through which it is conceived.

6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of
infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and
infinite essence.

EXPLANATION.

I say _absolutely_ infinite, not infinite _suo genere_--for of what
is infinite _suo genere_ only, the attributes are not infinite but
finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own
essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which
involves no impossibility.

7. That thing is 'free' which exists by the sole necessity of its
own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That
is 'not free' which is called into existence by something else, and
is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite
method.

8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessarily
and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal.

EXPLANATION.

Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity,
and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the
duration be without beginning or end.

So far the definitions; then follow the

AXIOMS.

1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue of
something else.

2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of something
else, we must conceive through and in itself.

3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if there be
no given cause no effect can follow.

4. Things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be
understood through one another--_i.e._ the conception of one does
not involve the conception of the other.

5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the cause of
it.

6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its _ideate_.

7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as non-existent
does not involve existence.

Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with which to start upon our enterprise of learning. The larger number of them, so far from being simple, must be absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction; they become only intelligible propositions as we look back upon them with the light of the system which they are supposed to contain.

Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such unlooked-for difficulties, the important question, after all, is not of the obscurity of these axioms, but of their truth. Many things in all the sciences are obscure to an unpractised understanding, which are true enough and clear enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and they may be fairly made the foundations of a scientific system, although rudimentary students must be contented to accept them upon faith. Of course, also, it is entirely competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply only to the ideas so defined, and not to any supposed object existing which corresponds with them. Euclid defines his triangles and circles, and discovers that to figures so described, certain properties previously unknown may be proved to belong. But as in nature there are no such things as triangles and circles exactly answering the definition, his conclusions, as applied to actually existing objects, are either not true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be possible to bridge over the gulf between existing things and the abstract conception of them, as Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal road to certainty if it be a practicable one; but we cannot say that we ever met any one who could say honestly Spinoza's reasonings had convinced him; and power of demonstration, like all other powers, can be judged only by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction? If not, it is nothing.

We need not detain our readers among these abstractions. The power of Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary appreciation, or we should long ago have heard the last of it. Like all other systems which have attracted followers, it addresses itself, not to the logical intellect, but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside. We refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which it thrusts itself upon our reception; but regarding it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the nature of the world of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these things we know that there must be, and the curiosity which asks the question regards itself, of course, as competent in some degree to judge of the answer to it.

Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy in the aspect in which it is really powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy of the method.

The system is evolved in a series of theorems in severely demonstrative order out of the definitions and axioms which we have translated. To propositions 1-6 we have nothing to object; they will not, probably, convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and seem to follow (as far as we can speak of 'following' in such subjects) by fair reasoning. 'Substance is prior in nature to its affections.' 'Substances with different attributes have nothing in common,' and, therefore, 'one cannot be the cause of the other.' 'Things really distinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute or mode (there being nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and, therefore, because things modally distinguished do not _quâ_ substance differ from one another, there cannot be more than one substance of the same attribute. Therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among what Spinoza calls _notiones simplicissimas_), since there cannot be two substances of the same attribute, and substances of different attributes cannot be the cause one of the other, it follows that no substance can be produced by another substance.'

The existence of substance, he then concludes, is involved in the nature of the thing itself. Substance exists. It does and must. We ask, why? and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it, and therefore it is self-caused--_i.e._ by the first definition the essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If it cannot be produced _and_ exists, then, of course, it exists in virtue of its own nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion, the proof falls to pieces. We have to fall back on the facts of experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves, are a real substantial something, before we find ground of any kind to stand upon. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, Spinoza winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say exists? Things--essences--existences! these are but the vague names with which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena, disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend was supported upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas of a fictitious resting-place.

If any one affirms (says Spinoza) that he has a clear,
distinct--that is to say, a true--idea of substance, but that
nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is
the same as if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet
was uncertain whether it was not false. Or if he says that
substance can be created, it is like saying that a false idea can
become a true idea--as absurd a thing as it is possible to conceive;
and therefore the existence of substance, as well as the essence of
it, must be acknowledged as an eternal verity.

It is again the same story. Spinoza speaks of a clear idea of substance; but he has not proved that such an idea is within the compass of the mind. A man's own notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he really sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in itself is no evidence that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as an existing thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists. This is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of this or that fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.

From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had been previously defined as the 'Ens absolute perfectum.'

Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important, however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the Pantheistic system.

As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:--God is an all-perfect Being,--perfection is the idea which we form of Him: existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism we are told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea--as much involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle. A non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle.

It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything--Titans, Chimæras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the matter. Such arguments are but endless _petitiones principii_--like the self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off ineffectual.

Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his _argumentum palmarium_ in proof of the existence of God), '_the more attributes I assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing_.' Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist (as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told, in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused habits of our own minds.

Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive. As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences. All such reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the nature of things external to ourselves as they really _are_ in their absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked proposition, it must involve a _petitio principii_. We have a right, however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a triangle were to conceive of him as _eminenter triangularis_, or a circle to give him the property of circularity.

Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him, modified in this manner or in that. Beyond him there is nothing, and nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence (for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence; and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of God.

Each attribute is infinite _suo genere_; and it is time that we should know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God, two only, he says, are known to us--'extension,' and 'thought,' or 'mind.' Duration, even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is not even a real thing. Time has no relation to Being, conceived mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, _sub quâdam specie æternitatis_. But extension, or substance extended, and thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We must not confound extension with body; for though body be a mode of extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself--or, in other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these attributes are produced from God, and in him they have their being, and without him they would cease to be.

Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most admirably indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that God is the only _causa libera_; that no other thing or being has any power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent (see _Tractat. Theol. Polit._ cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the _causa immanens omnium_; he is not a personal being existing apart from the universe; but himself in his own reality, he is expressed in the universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to the philosophical language of the time, Spinoza preserves the distinction between _natura naturans_ and _natura naturata_. The first is being in itself, the attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the properties of these attributes. And thus all which _is_, is what it is by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God is free, because no causes external to himself have power over him; and as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no infringement on God's freedom to say that he _must_ have acted as he has acted, but rather he is absolutely free because absolutely a law himself to himself.

Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics--the book which contains, as we said, the _notiones simplicissimas_, and the primary and rudimental deductions from them. _His Dei naturam_, he says, in his lofty confidence, _ejusque proprietates explicui_. But, as if conscious that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologise, but to show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors lies in our notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret God's action through our own; we speak of his intentions, as if he were a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our convenience we form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which to strive; and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be wicked. But such generic abstractions are but _entia imaginationis_, and have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the means of being. There is no rebellion against him, and no resistance of his will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent; what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.

If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were not
created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was
because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all
things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to
speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were ample
enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be
conceived by an Infinite Intelligence.

It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful, perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines if they were generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are worked into maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist. The fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once with how little justice the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions between virtue and vice.

We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged
something of the kind), we speak of this or that man having done a
wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of
humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such
abstract manner, nor forms to himself such generic definitions, and
since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to
it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in
respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's.

If this be so, then (replies Blyenburg), bad men fulfil God's will
as well as good.

It is true (Spinoza answers) they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor
as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The
better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's
spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being
without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and
through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings)
his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the
artificer--they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their
service.

Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme doctrine of Grace; and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to 'clay in the hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to dishonour,' may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion. If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert, in the same breath, that God has predetermined it,--to tell us that he has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher sacrilegious who has but systematised the faith which so many believe, and cleared it of its most hideous features.

Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from himself or from his readers. We believe for ourselves that logic has no business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the conscience and not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him with instances of monstrous crime, such as bring home to the heart the natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.

God (replies Spinoza, calmly) is the cause of all things which have
reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real
things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I
conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of
evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be
the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it
was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay
in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural
affection--none of which things express any positive essence, but
the absence of it; and therefore God was not the cause of these,
although he was the cause of the act and the intention.

But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain
intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free
will remain unremoved.