Spinoza

Now that twenty years have passed since I began the study of Spinoza it is good to find that he still holds his ground.  Much in him remains obscure, but there is enough which is sufficiently clear to give a direction to thought and to modify action.  To the professional metaphysician Spinoza’s work is already surpassed, and is absorbed in subsequent systems.  We are told to read him once because he is historically interesting, and then we are supposed to have done with him.  But if “Spinozism,” as it is called, is but a stage of development there is something in Spinoza which can be superseded as little as the Imitation of Christ or the Pilgrim’s Progress, and it is this which continues to draw men to him.  Goethe never cared for set philosophical systems.  Very early in life he thought he had found out that they were useless pieces of construction, but to the end of his days he clung to Spinoza, and Philina, of all persons in the world, repeats one of the finest sayings in the Ethic.  So far as the metaphysicians are carpenters, and there is much carpentering in most of them, Goethe was right, and the larger part of their industry endures wind and weather but for a short time.  Spinoza’s object was not to make a scheme of the universe.  He felt that the things on which men usually set their hearts give no permanent satisfaction, and he cast about for some means by which to secure “a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity.”  I propose now, without attempting to connect or contrast Spinoza with Descartes or the Germans, to name some of those thoughts in his books by which he conceived he had attained his end.

The sorrow of life is the rigidity of the material universe in which we are placed.  We are bound by physical laws, and there is a constant pressure of matter-of-fact evidence to prove that we are nothing but common and cheap products of the earth to which in a few moments or years we return.  Spinoza’s chief aim is to free us from this sorrow, and to free us from it by thinking.  The emphasis on this word is important.  He continually insists that a thing is not unreal because we cannot imagine it.  His own science, mathematics, affords him examples of what must be, although we cannot picture it, and he believes that true consolation lies in the region of that which cannot be imaged but can be thought.

Setting out on his quest, he lays hold at the very beginning on the idea of Substance, which he afterwards identifies with the idea of God.  “By Substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words, that, the conception of which does not need the conception of another thing from which it must be formed.” [34a]  “By God, I understand Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” [34b]  “God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.” [34c]  By the phrases “in itself” and “by itself,” we are to understand that this conception cannot be explained in other terms.  Substance must be posited, and there we must leave it.  The demonstration of the last-quoted proposition, the 11th, is elusive, and I must pass it by, merely observing that the objection that no idea involves existence, and that consequently the idea of God does not involve it, is not a refutation of Spinoza, who might rejoin that it is impossible not to affirm existence of God as the Ethic defines him.  Spinoza escapes one great theological difficulty.  Directly we begin to reflect we are dissatisfied with a material God, and the nobler religions assert that God is a Spirit.  But if He be a pure spirit whence comes the material universe?  To Spinoza pure spirit and pure matter are mere artifices of the understanding.  His God is the Substance with infinite attributes of which thought and extension are the two revealed to man, and he goes further, for he maintains that they are one and the same thing viewed in different ways, inside and outside of the same reality.  The conception of God, strictly speaking, is not incomprehensible, but it is not circum-prehensible; if it were it could not be the true conception of Him.

Spinoza declares that “the human mind possesses an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God” [36]—not of God in His completeness, but it is adequate.  The demonstration of this proposition is at first sight unsatisfactory, because we look for one which shall enable us to form an image of God like that which we can form of a triangle.  But we cannot have “a knowledge of God as distinct as that which we have of common notions, because we cannot imagine God as we can bodies.”  “To your question,” says Spinoza to Boxel, “whether I have as clear an idea of God as I have of a triangle?  I answer, Yes.  But if you ask me whether I have as clear an image of God as I have of a triangle I shall say, No; for we cannot imagine God, but we can in a measure understand Him.  Here also, it is to be observed that I do not say that I altogether know God, but that I understand some of His attributes—not all, nor the greatest part, and it is clear that my ignorance of very many does not prevent my knowledge of certain others.  When I learned the elements of Euclid, I very soon understood that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and I clearly perceived this property of a triangle, although I was ignorant of many others.” [37a]

“Individual things are nothing but affections or modes of God’s attributes, expressing those attributes in a certain and determinate manner,” [37b] and hence “the more we understand individual objects, the more we understand God.” [37c]

The intellect of God in no way resembles the human intellect, for we cannot conceive Him as proposing an end and considering the means to attain it.  “The intellect of God, in so far as it is conceived to constitute His essence, is in truth the cause of things, both of their essence and of their existence—a truth which seems to have been understood by those who have maintained that God’s intellect, will, and power are one and the same thing.” [37d]

The whole of God is fact, and Spinoza denies any reserve in Him of something unexpressed.  “The omnipotence of God has been actual from eternity, and in the same actuality will remain to eternity,” [38] not of course in the sense that everything which exists has always existed as we now know it, or that nothing will exist hereafter which does not exist now, but that in God everything that has been, and will be, eternally is.

The reader will perhaps ask, What has this theology to do with the “joy continuous and supreme”?  We shall presently meet with some deductions which contribute to it, but it is not difficult to understand that Spinoza, to use his own word, might call the truths set forth in these propositions “blessed.”  Let a man once believe in that God of infinite attributes of which thought and extension are those by which He manifests Himself to us; let him see that the opposition between thought and matter is fictitious; that his mind “is a part of the infinite intellect of God”; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and he will feel a relationship with infinity which will emancipate him.

It is not true that in Spinoza’s God there is so little that is positive that it is not worth preserving.  All Nature is in Him, and if the objector is sincere he will confess that it is not the lack of contents in the idea which is disappointing, but a lack of contents particularly interesting to himself.

The opposition between the mind and body of man as two diverse entities ceases with that between thought and extension.  It would be impossible briefly to explain in all its fulness what Spinoza means by the proposition: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body” [39]; it is sufficient here to say that, just as extension and thought are one, considered in different aspects, so body and mind are one.  We shall find in the fifth part of the Ethic that Spinoza affirms the eternity of the mind, though not perhaps in the way in which it is usually believed.

Following the order of the Ethic we now come to its more directly ethical maxims.  Spinoza denies the freedom commonly assigned to the will, or perhaps it is more correct to say he denies that it is intelligible.  The will is determined by the intellect.  The idea of the triangle involves the affirmation or volition that its three angles are equal to two right angles.  If we understand what a triangle is we are not “free” to believe that it contains more or less than two right angles, nor to act as if it contained more or less than two.  The only real freedom of the mind is obedience to the reason, and the mind is enslaved when it is under the dominion of the passions.  “God does not act from freedom of the will,” [40a] and consequently “things could have been produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than that in which they have been produced.” [40b]

“If you will but reflect,” Spinoza tells Boxel, “that indifference is nothing but ignorance or doubt, and that a will always constant and in all things determinate is a virtue and a necessary property of the intellect, you will see that my words are entirely in accord with the truth.” [40c]  To the same effect is a passage in a letter to Blyenbergh, “Our liberty does not consist in a certain contingency nor in a certain indifference, but in the manner of affirming or denying, so that in proportion as we affirm or deny anything with less indifference, are we the more free.” [41a]  So also to Schuller, “I call that thing free which exists and acts solely from the necessity of its own nature: I call that thing coerced which is determined to exist and to act in a certain and determinate manner by another.” [41b]  With regard to this definition it might be objected that the necessity does not lie solely in the person who wills but is also in the object.  The triangle as well as the nature of man contains the necessity.  What Spinoza means is that the free man by the necessity of his nature is bound to assert the truth of what follows from the definition of a triangle and that the stronger he feels the necessity the more free he is.  Hence it follows that the wider the range of the intellect and the more imperative the necessity which binds it, the larger is its freedom.

In genuine freedom Spinoza rejoices.  “The doctrine is of service in so far as it teaches us that we do everything by the will of God alone, and that we are partakers of the divine nature in proportion as our actions become more and more perfect and we more and more understand God.  This doctrine, therefore, besides giving repose in every way to the soul, has also this advantage, that it teaches us in what our highest happiness or blessedness consists, namely, in the knowledge of God alone, by which we are drawn to do those things only which love and piety persuade.” [42a]  In other words, being part of the whole, the grandeur and office of the whole are ours.  We are anxious about what we call “personality,” but in truth there is nothing in it of any worth, and the less we care for it the more “blessed” we are.

“By the desire which springs from reason we follow good directly and avoid evil indirectly” [42b]: our aim should be the good; in obtaining that we are delivered from evil.  To the same purpose is the conclusion of the fifth book of the Ethic that “No one delights in blessedness because he has restrained his affects, but, on the contrary, the power of restraining his lusts springs from blessedness itself.” [43a]  This is exactly what the Gospel says to the Law.

Fear is not the motive of a free man to do what is good.  “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is not a meditation upon death, but upon life.” [43b]  This is the celebrated sixty-seventh proposition of the fourth part.  If we examine the proof which directly depends on the sixty-third proposition of the same part—“he who is led by fear, and does what is good in order that he may avoid what is evil, is not led by reason”—we shall see that Spinoza is referring to the fear of the “evil” of hell-fire.

All Spinoza’s teaching with regard to the passions is a consequence of what he believes of God and man.  He will study the passions and not curse them.  He finds that by understanding them “we can bring it to pass that we suffer less from them.  We have, therefore, mainly to strive to acquire a clear and distinct knowledge of each affect.” [43c]  “If the human mind had none but adequate ideas it would form no notion of evil.” [44a]  “The difference between a man who is led by affect or opinion alone and one who is led by reason” is that “the former, whether he wills it or not, does those things of which he is entirely ignorant, but the latter does the will of no one but himself.” [44b]  They know not what they do.

The direct influence of Spinoza’s theology is also shown in his treatment of pity, hatred, laughter, and contempt.  “The man who has properly understood that everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature, and comes to pass according to the eternal laws and rules of nature, will in truth discover nothing which is worthy of hatred, laughter, or contempt, nor will he pity any one, but, so far as human virtue is able, he will endeavour to do well, as we say, and to rejoice.” [44c]  By pity is to be understood mere blind sympathy.  The good that we do by this pity with the eyes of the mind shut ought to be done with them open.  “He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives as much as possible to repay the hatred, anger, or contempt of others towards himself with love or generosity. . . . He who wishes to avenge injuries by hating in return does indeed live miserably.  But he who, on the contrary, strives to drive out hatred by love, fights joyfully and confidently, with equal ease resisting one man or a number of men, and needing scarcely any assistance from fortune.  Those whom he conquers yield gladly, not from defect of strength, but from an increase of it.” [45a]

“Joy is the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection: sorrow, on the other hand, is the passion by which it passes to a less perfection.” [45b]  “No God and no human being, except an envious one, is delighted by my impotence or my trouble, or esteems as any virtue in us tears, sighs, fears, and other things of this kind, which are signs of mental impotence; on the contrary, the greater the joy with which we are affected, the greater the perfection to which we pass thereby; that is to say, the more do we necessarily partake of the divine nature.” [46]  It would be difficult to find an account of joy and sorrow which is closer to the facts than that which Spinoza gives.  He lived amongst people Roman Catholic and Protestant who worshipped sorrow.  Sorrow was the divinely decreed law of life and joy was merely a permitted exception.  He reversed this order and his claim to be considered in this respect as one of the great revolutionary religious and moral reformers has not been sufficiently recognised.  It is remarkable that, unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction, but by simple sanity which requires no correction.  One reason for this peculiarity is that the Ethic was the result of long meditation.  It was published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before his death.  Usually what we call our convictions are propositions which we have not thoroughly examined in quietude, but notions which have just come into our heads and are irreversible to us solely because we are committed to them.  Much may be urged against the Ethic and on behalf of hatred, contempt, and sorrow.  The “other side” may be produced mechanically to almost every truth; the more easily, the more divine that truth is, and against no truths is it producible with less genuine mental effort than against those uttered by the founder of Christianity.  The question, however, if we are dealing with the New Testament, is not whether the Sermon on the Mount can be turned inside out in a debating society, but whether it does not represent better than anything which the clever leader of the opposition can formulate the principle or temper which should govern our conduct.

There is a group of propositions in the last part of the Ethic, which, although they are difficult, it may be well to notice, because they were evidently regarded by Spinoza as helping him to the end he had in view.  The difficulty lies in a peculiar combination of religious ideas and scientific form.  These propositions are the following:—[47]

“The mind can cause all the affections of the body or the images of things to be related to the idea of God.”

“He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his affects loves God, and loves Him better the better he understands himself and his affects.”

“This love to God above everything else ought to occupy the mind.”

“God is free from passions, nor is He affected with any affect of joy or sorrow.”

“No one can hate God.”

“He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.”

“This love to God cannot be defiled either by the effect of envy or jealousy, but is the more strengthened the more people we imagine to be connected with God by the same bond of love.”

The proof of the first of these propositions, using language somewhat different from that of the text, is as follows:—There is no affection of the body of which the mind cannot form some clear and distinct conception, that is to say, of everything perceived it is capable of forming a clear and adequate idea, not exhaustive, as Spinoza is careful to warn us, but an idea not distorted by our personality, and one which is in accordance with the thing itself, adequate as far as it goes.  Newton’s perception that the moon perpetually falls to the earth by the same numerical law under which a stone falls to it was an adequate perception.  “Therefore,” continues the demonstration (quoting the fifteenth proposition of the first part—“Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can either be or be conceived without God”), “the mind can cause all the affections of the body to be related to the idea of God.”  Spinoza, having arrived at his adequate idea thus takes a further step to the idea of God.  What is perceived is not an isolated external phenomenon.  It is a reality in God: it is God: there is nothing more to be thought or said of God than the affirmation of such realities as these.  The “relation to the idea of God” means that in the affirmation He is affirmed.  “Nothing,” that is to say, no reality “can be conceived without God.”

But it is possible for the word “love” to be applied to the relationship between man and God.  He who has a clear and adequate perception passes to greater perfection, and therefore rejoices.  Joy, accompanied with the idea of a cause, is love.  By the fourteenth proposition this joy is accompanied by the idea of God as its cause, and therefore love to God follows.  The demonstration seems formal, and we ask ourselves, What is the actual emotion which Spinoza describes?  It is not new to him, for in the Short Treatise, which is an early sketch for the Ethic, he thus writes:—“Hence it follows incontrovertibly that it is knowledge which is the cause of love, so that when we learn to know God in this way, we must necessarily unite ourselves to Him, for He cannot be known, nor can he reveal Himself, save as that which is supremely great and good.  In this union alone, as we have already said, our happiness consists.  I do not say that we must know Him adequately; but it is sufficient for us, in order to be united with Him, to know Him in a measure, for the knowledge we have of the body is not of such a kind that we can know it as it is or perfectly; and yet what a union! what love!” [50]

Perhaps it may clear the ground a little if we observe that Spinoza often avoids a negative by a positive statement.  Here he may intend to show us what the love of God is not, that it is not what it is described in the popular religion to be.  “The only love of God I know,” we may imagine him saying, “thus arises.  The adequate perception is the keenest of human joys for thereby I see God Himself.  That which I see is not a thing or a person, but nevertheless what I feel towards it can be called by no other name than love.  Although the object of this love is not thing or person it is not indefinite, it is this only which is definite; ‘thing’ and ‘person’ are abstract and unreal.  There was a love to God in Kepler’s heart when the three laws were revealed to him.  If it was not love to God, what is love to Him?”

To the eighteenth proposition, “No one can hate God,” there is a scholium which shows that the problem of pain which Spinoza has left unsolved must have occurred to him.  “But some may object that if we understand God to be the cause of all things, we do for that very reason consider Him to be the cause of sorrow.  But I reply that in so far as we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion (Prop. 3, pt. 5), that is to say (Prop. 59, pt. 3) it ceases to be a sorrow; and therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do we rejoice.”  The third proposition of the fifth part which he quotes merely proves that in so far as we understand passion it ceases to be a passion.  He replies to those “who ask why God has not created all men in such a manner that they might be controlled by the dictates of reason alone,” [52] “Because to Him material was not wanting for the creation of everything, from the highest down to the very lowest grade of perfection; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of His nature were so ample that they sufficed for the production of everything which can be conceived by an infinite intellect.”  Nevertheless of pain we have no explanation.  Pain is not lessened by understanding it, nor is its mystery penetrated if we see that to God material could not have been wanting for the creation of men or animals who have to endure it all their lives.  But if Spinoza is silent in the presence of pain, so also is every religion and philosophy which the world has seen.  Silence is the only conclusion of the Book of Job, and patient fortitude in the hope of future enlightenment is the conclusion of Christianity.

It is a weak mistake, however, to put aside what religions and philosophies tell us because it is insufficient.  To Job it is not revealed why suffering is apportioned so unequally or why it exists, but the answer of the Almighty from the whirlwind he cannot dispute, and although Spinoza has nothing more to say about pain than he says in the passages just quoted and was certainly not exempt from it himself, it may be impossible that any man should hate God.

We now come to the final propositions of the Ethic, those in which Spinoza declares his belief in the eternity of mind.  The twenty-second and twenty-third propositions of the fifth part are as follows:—

“In God, nevertheless, there necessarily exists an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity.”

“The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.”

The word “nevertheless” is a reference to the preceding proposition which denies the continuity of memory or imagination excepting so long as the body lasts.  The demonstration of the twenty-third proposition is not easy to grasp, but the substance of it is that although the mind is the idea of the body, that is to say, the mind is body as thought and body is thought as extension, the mind, or essence of the body, is not completely destroyed with the body.  It exists as an eternal idea, and by an eternal necessity in God.  Here again we must not think of that personality which is nothing better than a material notion, an image from the concrete applied to mind, but we must cling fast to thought, to the thoughts which alone makes us what we are, and these, says Spinoza, are in God and are not to be defined by time.  They have always been and always will be.  The enunciation of the thirty-third proposition is, “The intellectual love of God which arises from the third kind of knowledge is eternal.”  The “third kind of knowledge” is that intuitive science which “advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things;” [54] “No love except intellectual love is eternal,” [55a] and the scholium to this proposition adds, “If we look at the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their minds, but they confound it with duration, and attribute it to imagination or memory, which they believe remain after death.”  The intellectual love of the mind towards God is the very “love with which He loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity; that is to say, the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself.” [55b]  “Hence it follows that God, in so far as He loves Himself, loves men, and consequently that the love of God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one and the same thing.” [55c]  The more adequate ideas the mind forms “the less it suffers from those affects which are evil, and the less it fears death” because “the greater is that part which remains unharmed, and the less consequently does it suffer from the affects.”  It is possible even “for the human mind to be of such a nature that that part of it which we have shown perishes with its body, in comparison with the part of it which remains, is of no consequence.” [56a]

Spinoza, it is clear, holds that in some way—in what way he will not venture to determine—the more our souls are possessed by the intellectual love of God, the less is death to be dreaded, for the smaller is that part of us which can die.  Three parallel passages may be appended.  One will show that this was Spinoza’s belief from early years and the other two that it is not peculiar to him.  “If the soul is united with some other thing which is and remains unchangeable, it must also remain unchangeable and permanent.” [56b]  “Further, this creative reason does not at one time think, at another time not think [it thinks eternally]: and when separated from the body it remains nothing but what it essentially is: and thus it is alone immortal and eternal.  Of this unceasing work of thought, however, we retain no memory, because this reason is unaffected by its objects; whereas the receptive, passive intellect (which is affected) is perishable, and can really think nothing without the support of the creative intellect.” [57a]  The third quotation is from a great philosophic writer, but one to whom perhaps we should not turn for such a coincidence.  “I believe,” said Pantagruel, “that all intellectual souls are exempt from the scissors of Atropos.  They are all immortal.” [57b]

I have not tried to write an essay on Spinoza, for in writing an essay there is a temptation to a consistency and completeness which are contributed by the writer and are not to be found in his subject.  The warning must be reiterated that here as elsewhere we are too desirous, both writers and readers, of clear definition where none is possible.  We do not stop where the object of our contemplation stops for our eyes.  For my own part I must say that there is much in Spinoza which is beyond me, much which I cannot extend, and much which, if it can be extended, seems to involve contradiction.  But I have also found his works productive beyond those of almost any man I know of that acquiescentia mentis which enables us to live.