Chapter XXXIV (2)

The philosopher whose thought I have now to explain, Benedict Spinoza, is an interesting character, sprung from a remarkable race. He was born at Amsterdam, in November, 1632, a Jew by birth, and was carefully educated in the Jewish religion and in the Hebrew language and literature. But his energy of mind soon made him an object of suspicion amongst his brethren, and in his twenty-fourth year he was excommunicated, according to the Jewish ritual, from the Synagogue, and from all intercourse with any of the tribes of Israel.¹ He earned his livelihood by the art of grinding and polishing lenses for optical instruments, a kind of work at which he became very skilful. He was thus able to support himself in comparative ease and independence, as his wants were few, and his mode of life extremely simple.

¹ _Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy_, by F. Pollock, 1880.
The chief authority for the life of Spinoza is John Colerus,
a minister of the Lutheran Church, at the Hague, who first
published his account of Spinoza in the Dutch language, in
1705, and it appeared in French in 1706 and 1733.

As he adopted a mathematical method, his system is deductive, and the chief characteristics of his philosophy may be stated briefly as follows. His fundamental conception is the unity of substance, and by this he meant that which is in itself and is conceived by itself. There is but one substance in the universe with infinite attributes, and that is God. Two only of the attributes of this substance are cognisable by man, namely, thought and extension: there is no extended substance really distinct from thinking substance. All individual existence is included among the changing modes of these attributes, but such existence does not belong to God, else he would be finite, and not absolute, since all determination is negation. God is the immanent cause of all things, and operates according to the inner necessity of his nature, and in this consists his freedom. But he produces all finite effects only indirectly by finite causes, and nowhere proceeds with a view to ends, and there is no such thing as human freedom apart from causality. All that can be said is, that one mode of extension merely acts upon another mode of extension, and one mode of thought upon another mode of thought, and so on continually throughout the universe. Between thought and extension, on the other hand, there is a complete agreement, as the order of thought is identical with the order and connection of things, each thought in every case being merely the idea of the corresponding mode of extension. Our ideas vary in clearness and in value from the confused representations of the imagination to the adequate knowledge of the intellect, which conceives all particulars from the standpoint of the whole which contains them, and comprehends all things under the form of eternity, and as necessary. From those confused mental representations which cannot rise above the finite, spring passions and the bondage of the will, while intellectual knowledge may assume the form of pure love to God, in which our happiness and freedom consist.¹

¹ Compare Ueberweg’s _History of Philosophy_, Volume II., page
55, 1874.

Spinoza’s first published work was an exposition of the principles of Descartes’ philosophy, which appeared in 1663. It contained the exposition of two parts of Descartes’ Principles, and a fragment of a third part, with an appendix of “Metaphysical Reflections.” He adopted the geometric method of statement and argument, and so far as he went, gave a pretty fair account of Descartes’ system. His next work was entitled “Tractatus Theologico-politicus,” 1670. It is an elaborate and able defence of freedom of thought and speech in matters of religion. His final contention was, that “in a free state it should be lawful for every man to think what he will and to speak what he thinks.” In the development of his own thoughts, Spinoza seems to have been much influenced by his study of Maimonides, yet the two philosophers held different views touching the Jewish Scriptures; Spinoza adopting a theory which permitted him to treat the Bible historically and critically, while the earlier philosopher maintained that the Law was given to the Jews as a revelation of the highest truths. He was the author of several other treatises, but his chief work is his _Ethics_.

Spinoza’s _Ethics_ was not published till after his death, but it was written several years before; and he seems to have gradually elaborated it with much care. This work contains the fullest exposition of his system, and is divided into five parts, which treat respectively of God, of the nature and principle of the mind, of the source and nature of the affections, of human slavery or the power of the passions, and of human freedom or the power of the intellect. It is in this treatise that he developed his leading idea of substance and other subjects. But it is not at all an attractive work. The method of demonstration by definitions, axioms, propositions, postulates, corollaries, and scholia, is tedious and difficult to follow to the last degree. However, it is requisite to give some specimens of his method and form of thought.

In the first part of the _Ethics_, touching God, the following definitions are stated at the beginning:――“1. By self-caused I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that which cannot be conceived as non-existing. 2. A thing is called finite in its kind which can be limited by another of the same nature. 3. By substance I understand that which is self-contained and is conceived by itself. 4. By attribute I understand that which the mind perceives in substance as constituting its essence. 5. By mode I understand the affections of substance, or that which is in something else, through which it is apprehended. 6. By God I understand a Being absolutely infinite, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each expressing an eternal and infinite essence. 7. A thing is called free which by the sole necessity of its own nature is determined to action by itself alone, but constrained, if it is determined by something else, to exist and to act in a fixed manner. 8. By eternity I understand existence itself, so far as it is conceived to follow necessarily from the definition of an eternal thing.” The first definition is vague, for strictly speaking, the term self-caused is an irrational conception; because if anything is said to cause itself, it is assumed that it exists before itself, in order that it may cause itself. But Spinoza intended the definition to express the dependence of existence on essence; still the latter cannot cause the former, unless it already exists itself, thus what was to be caused already existed before being caused. The definition might have been put in this form: the first cause in the universe is self-existent and eternal and immutable in its essence. Others of his definitions involve inconsistencies, but it is unnecessary to go over them.

The axioms are next stated thus:――“1. All that is, is either in itself, or in some other than itself. 2. That which cannot be conceived by another thing, must be conceived by itself. 3. From a determinate cause an effect must follow; without such a cause no effect can follow. 4. Knowledge of an effect depends on the knowledge of the cause and involves the same. 5. Things that have nothing in common cannot explain each other. 6. A true idea must agree with its object. 7. Everything that can be conceived as not existing, its essence does not involve existence.”

From these definitions and axioms, he proceeded in a series of propositions to develop his ideas of God and the universe. These propositions extend to thirty-six, and he attempted throughout to give them the form and the reality of demonstrations.

His main conclusions in this part of the Ethics are these:――“Besides God, no substance can exist or be conceived to exist. Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be, nor can anything be conceived to be, without God.” He demonstrated this at some length, using geometrical illustrations, and then enunciated that “God acts by the sole laws of his own nature, and by constraint of nothing. God is the immanent indwelling, not the outside, cause of all things. God and all his attributes are eternal. The existence and the essence of God are one and the same thing. All that follows from the absolute nature of any attribute of God must have existed from eternity. God is not only the efficient cause of the existence of things, but also their essence. The thing that is determined to effect anything is necessarily so determined by God, and that which is not determined by God cannot determine itself to act, and therefore ♦the thing that is determined by God to do anything cannot render itself undetermined. The individual finite thing that has determinate existence cannot be determined to exist and act, unless it be itself determined to exist and act by another cause, which is also finite and possessed of determinate existence, and this cause again can neither exist nor be determined to act save by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and this yet again by another, and so on to infinity. In the nature of things there is no contingency; as all things are determined by the necessity of the Divine nature to exist and to act in a definite manner.”

♦ duplicate word “the” removed

“Understanding, whether as finite or infinite, must comprehend the attributes and the affections of God, and nothing else. Will cannot be called a free cause, but a necessary cause only. Things could have been produced by God in no other order than as they have been produced. Nothing exists from the nature of which some effect does not follow.” These are some of the principal ideas which Spinoza essayed to demonstrate; but at the end of this part of his work, he was aware that many prejudices existed among mankind, which would prevent them from adopting his views; and therefore he deemed it worth his trouble to examine such prejudices more fully in an appendix, in which he assailed the doctrine of final causes, and exerted his power of sarcasm to extinguish it.

He began the second part of his Ethics, on the nature and origin of the mind, as before, with definitions and axioms; and then proceeded to demonstrate his views in a series of propositions. The first four propositions are couched in the following terms:――“Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking entity. Extension is an attribute of God, or God is an extended being. The idea of his own essence, as all things that necessarily follow from it, necessarily exist in God. The idea of God whence infinities follow in infinite modes can only be single.” The idea of an individual thing existing in act is considered as effected by another idea of an individual thing existing in act, of which God is also the cause, in so far as he is effected by a third idea existing in act, and so on to infinity; the order and chain of ideas and causes being the same throughout the universe.

“The human mind does not know the human body in itself, nor does it know that the body exists except through the ideas of the affections by which the body is influenced. There is also present in God an idea or consciousness of the human mind, and this follows in the same way, and is referred to God in the same manner, as the idea of consciousness of the human body. This idea of the mind is united with the mind in the same way as the mind itself is united with the body. The mind not only perceives the affections of the body, but the ideas of these affections also. The mind has no consciousness of itself, save in so far as it perceives ideas of the affections of the body. The human mind involves no adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human body. The idea of each affection of the human body does not involve knowledge of an external body. The human mind perceives no external body as existing in fact, save through ideas of affections of the body. The idea of any state or affection of the human body does not involve the adequate cognition of the human body itself. Ideas of the affections of the human body, in so far as they are referred to the mind only, are not clear and distinct, but confused. The idea of each of the affections of the human body does not involve the adequate cognition of the human mind. All ideas in so far as they are referred to God, are true. Falsehood consists in the absence of the cognition which inadequate and confused ideas involve. Inadequate and confused ideas follow by the same necessity as clear and distinct ones.”

All these statements are elaborated at length. Then he distinguished three degrees of cognition. First, opinion, which is the development of perceptions and general notions from the impression of the senses, represented to the understanding confusedly, or through certain words retained in the memory, which may represent imperfect ideas of things. The second kind of cognition he called reason, which consists of common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things. The third and highest kind of cognition is intuition, which proceeds from the adequate idea of the real essence of some of the attributes of God, to the requisite cognition of the essence of things. Cognitions of the first kind may be uncertain or untrue; those of the second and third kind are necessarily true, and teach us to distinguish the true from the false. He who has a true idea, is at the same time certain of its truth. The human mind in so far as it has true ideas, is a part of the infinite intellect of God; and so its clear and distinct ideas are as necessarily true as are the ideas of God.¹ As reason considers things as they really are in themselves, it concludes that they are not contingent but necessary. This necessity of things is the very necessity of the eternal nature of God; therefore, reason apprehends things under a certain form of eternity. Every idea of an actual concrete object necessarily involves the eternal and infinite essence of God, which pervades all alike, and is therefore adequately cognised by the human mind.

¹ The very core of Cartesianism.

But there is no such thing in the mind as free-will, since it is a certain and determined mode of thought. “It is determined to will this or that by a cause which is determined by another cause, this by another, and so on to infinity.” The will to affirm or deny ideas is not a mere causeless act, it is the necessary consequence of the ideas; as distinct volitions and ideas are identical, so also are will and understanding one and the same.

The third part of the Ethics, treating on the affections and the emotions, as usual opened with definitions. By affections and emotions, he meant states of the body, whereby its power to act is increased or diminished, aided or controlled, together with the mental ideas of these affections. Opposing natures which would destroy each other cannot exist in the same individual; and each individual thing as far as it can strives to conserve its life. The idea of anything which increases or diminishes the power of the body to act, in an equal degree increases or diminishes the thinking power of the mind; hence the mind strives to imagine such things as increase the power of the body to act. Desire is conscious appetite, and appetite is the very essence of man, in so far as he is determined to those actions that subserve his own preservation.

Spinoza gave a wide meaning to the word desire, including under it efforts, impulses, appetites, and volitions of every kind. Still this part of his work is the most valuable portion of his philosophy.

He recognised only three primary affections, namely, joy, sorrow, and desire. Joy is explained as the transition from a less to a higher state of perfection, while a change in the opposite sense causes sorrow. Love is joy associated with the idea of an external object. Hate is sorrow accompanied by the idea of an external cause. Liking is joy accompanied by the idea of an object which is accidentally the cause of joy. Devotion is love of that which we admire. Scorn is pleasure sprung from this――that something we despise is imagined in the thing we hate. Hope is wavering joy sprung from an idea of something past or to come, of the issue of which we are more or less in doubt. Fear is unstable sorrow arising from the idea of something past or future, of the issue of which we are in some degree doubtful. Security is joy derived from the idea of something past or future in connection with which all cause of doubt is removed. Despair is sorrow sprung from the idea of a future or past thing combined with no cause of doubt. Thus it appears, that security may be associated with hope, and despair with fear. Sympathy is love so affecting man that he rejoices in another’s weal, and on the other side, grieves over another’s woe.

Thus his descriptions of the affections are generally brief, but careful and well stated. His general description of the affections is to this effect: “The affection which is characterised as a passion of the mind is a confused idea, whereby the mind affirms a stronger or weaker power of existing than was before experienced in its body, or some parts of its body, and which being affirmed, the mind itself is determined to think of this thing rather than of that.” He also stated that all our ideas of bodies rather proclaim the actual constitution of our own body than the nature of any external body, and that those ideas which constitute emotional forms must indicate or express the constitution of the body, or some of its parts, increasing or diminishing its power of acting.

The fourth part of the Ethics treated on the strength of the affections, or human slavery, by which he meant that man is impotent in the direction and the restraint of his own passions. In his introduction to this part, he says: “I call man’s inability to moderate and to control the affective and emotional element in his nature, Slavery. For man under the dominion of his affections is not master of himself, but is controlled by fate, as it were, so that in seeing and even in approving of the better course, he, nevertheless, feels himself constrained to follow the worse.” He repeats his view that there is no final causes or free-will, and then states: “We have shown that nature does not act with a purpose, for the eternal and infinite Being whom we call God, or Nature, as he exists of necessity, so does he act of necessity; and we have shown that by the same necessity that God exists, by the same necessity does he act. The reason, therefore, why God exists and why he acts, is one and the same, and as he does not exist for any end or purpose, so he does not act for any end or purpose; for as he is without beginning or end, as regards his existence, so is he infinite and eternal as regards his acts. Now a final cause, as it is called, is nothing but a human appetite or desire, considered as the cause of anything.”

In this part, his moral views are mainly founded on the following definitions of good and evil:――“By good I understand that which we know to be useful to us. By evil I understand that which we know prevents us from enjoying something good.” The knowledge of good and evil is nothing more than an emotion of joy or of sorrow, so far as we are conscious of this; hence we call that good or evil which favours or opposes the continuance of our life, or anything which assists or hinders our powers of action. To act virtuously is merely to act for our own life, and to preserve ourselves by the dictates of reason. Man always seeks to preserve his life for the sake of nothing but that which he thinks useful to him. The mind in so far as it reasons, desires nothing but to understand; nor does it judge anything to be useful to it save that which leads to understanding――and therefore we know nothing certainly as good save that which leads truly to understanding; and on the other hand, nothing is evil save that which prevents us from understanding. “The supreme good of the mind is the knowledge of God, and the highest virtue is to know God.” This is the highest knowledge that the human mind can attain. “Therefore that which is supremely useful or good to the mind is the knowledge of God ... the absolute virtue or power of the mind is, therefore, to understand. But the height of the mind’s understanding is God; consequently, the supreme power of the mind is to know God.”

We call that evil which is the cause of grief or pain to us. In so far as anything agrees with our nature, so far it is good; hence the more that anything accords with our nature, the more useful it is to us, and the more it is good; and so the more useful anything is to us, the more does it agree with our nature. “Nothing, therefore, save in so far as it accords with our nature, can be good; even as the more a thing accords with our nature, the more useful it is.”

The good that the virtuous man desires for himself he also desires for his fellow-men, and this the more ardently as he has a high cognition of God. “Therefore does the votary of virtue desire for all men the good he desires for himself.... Thus, therefore, the greater the conception of God involved in the essence of the mind, the greater will be the desire of the disciple of virtue that any good he enjoys himself should also be enjoyed by others.” Moreover, “the good which a man desires, he will love and desire more constantly if he see that others love and desire it also; and so he will strive to make others love it; and because this good is common to all, and all may equally share it, he will further strive that all should enjoy it, and this so much the more as he himself enjoys it the more.”

All that conduces to the order of society, and tends to make men live in amity, is good; while whatever brings disorder into the state is evil, as everything that causes men to live amicably together, at the same time causes them to live in conformity with reason, and is therefore good. “The man led by reason is freer when he lives as a member of a community under compact and bond of law, than when he lives in solitude and obeys himself alone.... The man, therefore, who is led by reason and desire to live in freedom is careful to observe the common laws of his country.”

To make this part of his work more clear and compact, he gave in an appendix an excellent summary of the whole, and concluded with the following:――

“Man’s power is very limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; and, therefore, we have no absolute power of adapting to our own use things external to ourselves. Still, we should bear with an even mind that which befalls us against the conditions of our advantage, if we are aware that we have fairly done our duty, and that the power we possess could not have gone so far as to avoid those evils, and that we are a part of the whole order of nature, and bound thereby. And understanding this much clearly and distinctly that the part of us which is called intellect, our better part, will therein be contented, and will seek to persist in that content. For, so far as we understand, we consider only that which is necessary, and can rest in nothing but the truth, and, therefore, so far as we rightly understand these things, the endeavour of our better part accords with the universal order of nature.”

The fifth and last part of the Ethics treats on the power of the understanding or human freedom. He repeated his doctrine that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order of things.¹ Spinoza’s aim in this part is mainly to expound the relation between emotion and reason, the power of the latter over the energy of the former. A passion itself is a confused idea, but whenever we are able to form a clear and distinct idea of it, it ceases to be a passion; hence it follows that to know the passions is the best way to restrain them; understand the passions that you may be master of them. The more that the mind recognises all things as necessary, the less does it suffer from the passions. He who clearly and distinctly knows himself and his passions, rejoices, because such knowledge is accompanied with the idea of God. The love of God ought chiefly to fill the mind, as it is associated with all the higher emotions. “God is without passions or any emotion of joy or sorrow, because all ideas so far as they are referred to God are true; again, God cannot pass from a greater to a less, or from a less to a greater state of perfection. Therefore, as God is not affected by joy nor sorrow, he can neither love or hate anyone. No one can hate God, because the idea of God within us is adequate and perfect; and so far as we contemplate him, to that extent do we act, and consequently, there can be no pain associated with the idea of God. He that loves God cannot seek that God should love him in return; because if man looked for this, he would thereby desire that God should not be God. This love towards God is the highest good which man under the dictates of reason can desire; it is common to all mankind, and we can wish that all should enjoy it as much as ourselves; thus the love of God is not liable to be narrowed by envy or jealousy, on the contrary, it must be cherished the more, the greater the number of our fellow-men we imagine to enjoy it.”

¹ This identity of thought with the order of development in
things was adopted by Hegel.

Touching the duration of the human mind, though it cannot remember anything that is past, save during the continuance of the body, yet, as God is the cause of its existence, and also of its essence, there is an idea in God which expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity. Thus the human mind cannot be wholly destroyed with the body, something of it survives which is eternal. This idea which expresses the essence of body under the form of eternity is a certain mode of thought belonging to the essence of the mind, and necessarily eternal. This, however, cannot be determined by a reference to duration in time, as we cannot remember to have existed before our bodies; nevertheless we feel and are persuaded that we are eternal, as the ground of this feeling and conception is logical demonstration. Our mind can only be said to endure, and its existence to be limited to a certain time, in so far as the existence of the body is involved, and thus far only has the mind the power of apprehending things under the form of time.

The highest effort of the mind and the highest virtue is to understand things through the most perfect kind of cognition; and this is the cognition proceeding from an adequate idea of certain attributes of God to an adequate conception of the essence of things, and the more we comprehend things in this way, the more we know of God. The more apt the mind is to know things in this way the greater its desire for such knowledge, and from this springs the highest satisfaction of the mind. “Our mind in so far as it knows itself and the body under the form of eternity, thus far has it a requisite knowledge of God, and knows that it is in God and is conceived through God. This kind of intuitive cognition depends on the mind itself as its formal cause, in so far as the mind itself is eternal. The farther we advance in this kind of knowledge, the more conscious are we of ourselves and of God, we take delight in it, and our joy is associated with the idea of God as its cause. From this intuitive cognition arises the intellectual love of God, which is eternal. God loves himself with an infinite intellectual love. The intellectual love of the mind for God is the very love of God――the love wherewith God loves himself, not as He is infinite, but as He can be interpreted by the essence of the human mind considered under the form of eternity; that is, the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves Himself. Hence it follows, that in so far as God loves Himself, He loves mankind, and that the love of God for man, and the intellectual love of the mind of man for God, are one and the same. From this we clearly understand wherein consists our salvation, our happiness, and our liberty. It is this eternal love of God, which in sacred scripture is spoken of as glory, and with truth, for whether it be referred to the mind of man or of God, it is rightly designated peace of mind, which, in fact, is not to be distinguished from the glory of scripture. There is nothing in nature opposed to this intellectual love, or to abrogate it, and the greater the number of things that the mind knows, according to the second and the third kinds of cognition, the less does it suffer from evil passions, and the less does it fear death.”

He touched on other points of interest to this effect. Inasmuch as the most perfect peace of mind arises from intuitive cognition, it follows that the human mind may be of such a nature that what we have shown to be liable to pass away and perish with the body, when contrasted with what remains, may be of no significance. He who has a mind capable of many things, has a mind the greatest part of which is eternal. Inasmuch as human bodies are capable of a great variety of actions, it is not doubtful that their nature may be such as to be referable to minds which have extensive knowledge of God and of themselves, and of which the principal part is eternal, so that they have scarcely any fear of death. The more perfect anything is it is the more real, and the more active it is the less it suffers; hence the more perfect a thing is the more active it is. From this it is assumed to follow that the part of the mind which remains after the death of the body, whatever be its quantity, is more perfect than the rest. Now, the eternal part of the mind is the understanding, by which we say that we act, but the part that perishes we have shown to be that wherewith the imagination is connected.

From what is stated above, and in other parts of his works, it appears that the human mind, in so far as it is possessed of understanding, is an eternal mode of thought, which is determined by another eternal mode of thought, this by another, and so on to infinity――so that all together constitute the eternal and infinite intelligence of God. Thus, whatever portion of the mind of man may survive the body, is merged in the divine mind. It has no conscious or distinct existence of its own. It is merely a mode of thought controlled by another and another mode of thought till united and centred in the one eternal essence of the universe.

Spinoza then made some remarks on what he had stated on morality in other parts of the work, and concluded with these words: “Herewith I have finished all that I proposed to say touching the power of the mind over the emotions and her freedom. Whence it is evident how great is the wise man’s power and his advantage over the ignorant man who is driven by blind desire. For as such a man is distracted by external influences, and in many ways besides, and never attains true contentment in his soul; he lives, as it were, without sense of himself and God and the nature of things, and no sooner ceases to suffer than he ceases to be. Whereas the wise man, if we take him as such, is of a constant mind, and being aware of himself and of God and the nature of things in a way of eternal necessity, does never cease to be, but is ever in possession of true contentment. And if the way I have shown to lead hither seems exceedingly hard, yet it may be discovered. That truly must be hard which is seldom found. For if salvation were so easy and could be found with little trouble, how should it come to pass that nearly all mankind neglect it? But every excellent work is as difficult as it is rare.” Thus, in the final result, Spinoza came near to the Stoics’ position: which is, that the way is open to everyone alike, but as things stand, the mass of mankind are ruled by the coarser motives, which alone they appreciate. He does not seem to have believed in any great improvement of the body of mankind; and considering the state of Europe in his day, and all the circumstances around him, who could blame him? Even now and here, it must be confessed that the most sanguine thinker, and the most hopeful reformer, frequently meet with many things which might shake the confidence of the firmest mind and the warmest heart.

Viewing Spinoza’s work as a system of the universe, or as a philosophy of existence, it falls far short of its end. Both in its principles and in its details it is defective, and it contains many inconsistencies which have often been pointed out.

But it is chiefly as a moral system that it is interesting to us. Though he treated many moral points ably and fairly, and freely admitted and even insisted on the value of the principle of utility, yet the defects of his system, considered as a moral philosophy, are obvious. If morality and religion are related subjects, which in various ways strengthen each other, then little can be made of his system――since a God of infinite and eternal existence, of infinite intelligence and perfection, but without will or purpose, or moral attributes of any kind, could hardly be an object of worship to ordinary men. But apart from this, and taking morality in the narrowest sense, his ethical system is defective in many points, which it is needless to particularise.

Spinoza in several parts of his writings greatly underrated the complexity of the problems of ethical and political science. He nowhere signalised the distinction between positive morality and positive law. He was often astonishingly wrong in believing that he had found a short road to certain and perfect knowledge, and this is especially noticeable in his treatment of politics. He thought that no important experiment in politics remained to be tried that had not been already discovered and attempted. He manifested no grasp of the method of the gradual development of society and political institutions; such shortcomings, however, were common to the philosophers of the period.

But finally, as a philosopher, and as a man, Spinoza manifested great moral energy and force of character. He was gifted with an intellect of a keen and original cast, though not of the most comprehensive and highest order. His doctrine of the eternity of the human mind is one of the boldest efforts of speculative thought on record, and exhibited a grasp of mind rarely attained, while it has produced memorable results. His identification of the human mind with God seems to have suggested the speculations of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel touching the comprehension of the Absolute or God, which raised such a stir in Germany and in France in the first half of the present century; and, indeed, historically, Spinoza’s writings have had much influence in various directions.

An account of Spinoza’s philosophy is given in the chief histories of philosophy, and there are several works which specially treat on his system, among which may be mentioned, Pollock’s _Life and Philosophy of Spinoza_, 1880; Willis’s _Life, Correspondence, and Ethics of Spinoza_, 1870; and others in French and German. Soon after the publication of Spinoza’s system, a considerable number of works appeared in which his views were combated. Though not at all a believer in the philosophy of Spinoza myself, nevertheless, I can honestly join with Schleiermacher, who said:――“Offer reverentially with me a lock to the manes of the holy, rejected Spinoza! He was filled with the lofty world-spirit; the infinite was his beginning and his end; the universe his only and eternal love. In holy innocence and deep humility he saw himself in the mirror of the eternal world, and saw how he too was its most lovely mirror; full of religion was he, and full of holy spirit, and hence he stands there alone and unrivalled, master in his art, but exalted above the profane guild, without disciples and without civil right.”

Leibnitz, a contemporary of Spinoza, is usually regarded as the founder of the German philosophy of the eighteenth century.¹ He attained to eminence both in philosophy and in mathematics, and wrote on many subjects. But he nowhere developed his philosophical views in a systematic and complete form; a mere summary of his doctrines was presented in his exposition of the monadology.

¹ Born 1646, and died 1716. A list of the books which specially
treat on the life, the writings, and the philosophy of
Leibnitz, is given in the second volume, Ueberweg’s _History
of Philosophy_, pages 94‒96.

He adopted the dogmatic form of philosophising, that is, he believed that the power of human thought, when aided by clear and distinct ideas, could transcend the limits of experience, and attain to perfect truth. But he overstepped both the dualism of Descartes and the monism of Spinoza, by the recognition of a graduated scale of beings. Eternal truths are in the divine understanding, distinct from the divine will; the divine mind being the source of the possibility of things, while the divine will is the cause of their reality; and hence all truth must by its nature be rational. In psychology he adopted a form of the doctrine of innate ideas, associated with the principles of identity and contradiction. Error arises from a want of clearness and distinctness; while dark and confused knowledge may be raised by demonstration to clearness and distinctness.

The aim of his theory of monads¹ is to ascertain the existence and to determine the nature of the simplest elements of substance, into which all other things and beings might be resolved. The primary monads seem to be something like atoms, or units of matter and of mind, endowed with life and ideas. All the monads have ideas, but of different degrees of clearness. God is the first monad, the primitive substance, and all His ideas are perfect. The souls of animals have sensation and memory. Every soul is a monad, as its power of acting proves its substantiality, and all substances are monads. Inorganic nature is merely an aggregate of undeveloped monads, while plants and minerals are a kind of sleeping monads with unconscious ideas; but in plants these ideas are formative forces. Man is a monad that has been waked up. The monads are not distinguishable in kind, but only in degree; the difference between them consists in the separate stages of development which each has attained. Every conscious monad has the clearest perception of those parts of the universe to which it is most nearly related; and thus from its own standpoint it is a mirror of the universe.

¹ Leibnitz seems to have borrowed the term monads from Bruno;
see page 400.

His theory of “pre-established harmony” is thus expressed by himself: ――“Every body acts as if there were no soul, and every soul acts as if there were no body; and yet both act as if each was influenced by the other.” So between the succession of the ideas, and the motions of the monad, there is a harmony pre-established by God. The soul and body of man agree, as it were, like the two clocks originally set together, and exactly moving at the same rate. In the same way each part of the universe harmonises with every other part. Creation simply consisted in first establishing, once for all, the laws of this unity and harmony; everything being arranged, the parts assigned to their places, every thought and every motion having been foreseen and provided for, when the universe was first called into existence. The existing world, therefore, is the best of all possible worlds, whether our limited minds can understand it in this light or not. The continuity of physical law is never broken, and yet the moral world is in harmony with the physical world, as the course of nature in all cases must be in accord with the highest interest of the soul.¹

¹ Compare Stewart’s _Dissertion_, pages 254‒257, 560‒561,
edition, 1854; and Ueberweg’s _History of Philosophy_, Volume
II., pages 106‒113.

Though Leibnitz endeavoured to unite the cosmological and the theological ideas, the origin of the world from God, and its explanation by physical laws, yet he completely failed to establish a real harmony of the two conceptions; as everyone before and after him has failed in their attempts to unite opposite elements in one conception. The inconsistencies of his philosophy have often been exposed; nevertheless, it is only justice to state that his writings contained many valuable suggestions, which subsequently proved to be true.¹

¹ For instance, his view of the unconscious modifications of
the mind, or latent mental modifications.

Bayle, the author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary, exercised a pretty wide influence on philosophical opinions.¹ He had a sceptical cast of mind, and directed his shafts against all forms of dogmatism, often indulging in sallies of ironical humour. He was a man of considerable erudition, an acute critic, and endowed with much logical tact and metaphysical subtlety. There are other philosophers whose works I should have deemed it necessary to notice, if I had been writing a complete history of philosophy, such as Malebranche, De la Forge, Sylvain Regis, Arnauld, P. Nicole, Pascal, Du Hamel, Wolff, and others.

¹ Born 1647, died 1706.

Turning to English philosophy, it may be noted that at the present time many in England are conversant with the philosophy of Germany and of France; and the influence of the speculations of both these nations on the English thought of the nineteenth century is probably much greater than is commonly believed. While in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in the latter, English philosophy greatly influenced the philosophy of France, and in a less degree that of Germany, and in the present century all sides have influenced each other; although it appears that German speculation has recently been in the ascendant in some quarters of England, and even in Scotland.

The place of Lord Bacon in the history of philosophy has often been very differently estimated, according to the standpoint of those who have essayed to discuss the subject.¹ Bacon’s avowed aim was to increase the power of man by enlarging the range of his knowledge. But to affect this, the mind must be freed from prejudice and superstition of every sort, so that it may be enabled to apprehend things in their real relations. Knowledge must begin with experience, starting from observation and experiment, whence by induction it should proceed methodically, first to the simpler propositions, and then to others of higher generality, rising gradually step by step to higher universality; and then finally, from these to descend to the particular, and thus to arrive at discoveries which should extend the power of man over nature. To attain such results he insisted strongly on the value and the necessity of a patient collection and accurate comparison of facts.

¹ Born 1561, died 1625.

Bacon’s plan for the reorganisation of the sciences embraced a general review of the whole intellectual field. This was followed by his doctrine of method, and then by an exposition of the sciences themselves, with their application to new discoveries. His conception was grand, and his end highly laudable; but the development of the principles of his method is far from complete. His own attempts at original investigation in applying his method is often crude, and fall much below some of the efforts of his own contemporaries. Still, he succeeded in indicating several of the fundamental points of induction; and thus he became the founder of the empirical school of modern philosophers, though he himself was greater as a critic than as a philosopher. His greatest merit was that he emphatically insisted on the importance of the collection, arrangement, and comparison of facts. On the other hand, he undervalued the method of deduction, and the value of the syllogism for deductive and mediate knowledge.

His writings have had much influence in Britain, and in other countries of Europe, especially in France; and thus his method of induction has contributed at home and abroad to the progress of physical science.¹

¹ An excellent account of Bacon and his philosophy is given by
Kuno Fischer in a work entitled, “Franz Baco von Verulam, die
Real-philosophie und ihr Zeitalter,” 1856.

The eccentric Lord Herbert of Cherbury was a writer of some note.¹ In his remarkable work, “De Veritate,” he treated on various points of mental philosophy. He distinguished the faculties of the mind into four, namely, natural instinct, the inner sense, the external sense, and the discursive faculty. Each of these powers affords a certain class of truths, and all truth must become known to us through one or other of these faculties. But the truths of natural instinct are relatively higher and more certain than any other. By this faculty (which might have been called intellectual instinct) we apprehend the common notions touching the relations of things, and especially those which tend to our own preservation. They are implanted in us by nature, and represent something of the divine image and wisdom. They are primary notions, since they are necessary, independent, universal, certain, and instantaneous in their manifestation.

¹ Born 1581, died 1648.

The inner sense under the direction of natural instinct, or the common notions, embraces all the powers which are associated with the particular forms of the agreeable and the disagreeable, of good and evil, whether these are dependent on the body or on the mind. The chief internal sense is conscience, which judges what is good and evil in their various relations, and thus determines what ought to be done.

The external senses depend on the special effects of external objects upon our external organs, jointly with the corresponding internal senses and the natural instincts. The discursive faculty gives that knowledge of objects presented by the internal and external senses, which depends on special capacities for investigation, and on the common notions; and it has reference to existence, qualities, quantities, relations, and especially to their causes.

He was also the author of several religious treatises and historical works. He distinguished man from animals, not merely by the gift of reason, but specially by the capacity of religion, which is peculiar to the former. He held that all men had the five following notions of religion:――That there is a God; that He ought to be worshipped; that virtue and piety are the chief elements of worship; that repentance is a duty; and that there is a future life, with rewards and punishments. He maintained that a revelation is possible to individuals, and affirmed that a special revelation was made to himself; but, since nothing can be admitted as revealed which contradicts the five common notions, and anything beyond these can be of no importance to the human race, therefore, no such revelation should be made public. His views had some influence on the subsequent lines of English thought, and he has sometimes been signalised as the earliest of that class of writers called the English Deists.

But the most famous English philosopher of the Rebellion period was Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Born in 1588, he was in the prime of life when the struggle between the parliament and Charles I. began in earnest. Hobbes firmly maintained the view that the King had an unquestionable right to absolute and supreme power in the State; and it is palpably evident that his philosophy, and especially his political and religious speculations, were much influenced by the struggles of his own day in England. He was deeply touched by the sight which the Civil War presented, and the imprisonment and execution of the King, the religious rancour and the hypocrisy which were mingled in the conflict, and the consequent suffering of the nation. In such circumstances, with his prepossessions, it would be unreasonable to expect from him sound opinions and conclusions on politics; nevertheless, he was an original thinker of great power, and a man of varied accomplishments. None of his philosophical or political works were published till he was past fifty years of age, so they were not the crude performances of youth, but the deliberate outcome of his matured thought. In his different treatises and works, however, he again and again repeated his chief psychological views and political doctrines, in slightly varied language, but identically the same in ideas and thought.

In his “Elements of Philosophy,” published in 1655, and divided into four parts, which treated of logic, of the first grounds of philosophy, of the proportions of motions and magnitudes, and of physics, he defines philosophy as the knowledge of effects by their causes, and of causes from their observed effects, by means of true inferences. The end of philosophy is the application of our knowledge of effects to the utmost of our strength, for the benefit of human life, as the end of knowledge is power, which should result in action. The utility of philosophy is especially seen in physical science, in geometry, in astronomy, and in navigation. From his conception of philosophy, he excluded the doctrine of God, because He is “eternal, ingenerable, incomprehensible, and in Whom there is nothing either to divide or compound, or any generation to be conceived”;¹ and also knowledge acquired by divine inspiration, and all false doctrines, such as astrology and divinations: for all that which we know by legitimate deduction can neither be false nor doubtful. I may state that Hobbes’s idea of God was entirely negative. In his “Leviathan,” after running over a number of terms and expressions which should not be applied to God, he says:――“He that will attribute to God nothing but what is warranted by natural reason, must either use such negative attributes as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible; or most high, most great; or indefinite, as good, just, holy; and in such sense as if he meant not to declare what he is.... There is but one name to signify our conception of his nature, and that is, I AM; and but one name of his relation to us, and that is God.” He distinguished philosophy into natural and civil. But in order to understand the properties of a commonwealth, it is necessary first to know the dispositions and manners of men; and so civil philosophy is divided into two parts, the one treating of men’s dispositions and manners, called ethics, and the other treating of their civil duties, called political philosophy.² In the _Leviathan_, published in 1651, he gives a kind of classification of the sciences, a pretty complete formulation of the knowledge and science of the time. He reduced everything to consequences. Matter or bodies being assumed, motion and quantity are placed at the top of the scale; while consequences from quantity, and motion indeterminate, which being the principles or first foundation of philosophy, “philosophia prima,” forms the basis of the whole. Then follow consequences from quantity, and motion determined――Mathematics, Geometry; consequences from motion and quantity determined――Cosmography, Astronomy, Geography, and so on, politics being classed with physics as a part of natural philosophy.³

¹ Part I., Chapter I., Section 2, _et seq._ All my references
are to the collective ♦edition of Hobbes’s English works, by
Sir William Molesworth.

♦ “dition” replaced with “edition”

² _Leviathan_, Part II., Chapter XXXI.

³ Part I., Chapter IX.