anything—and I must, at least, grant myself—I grant existence, which, having nothing outside itself, must fill up all the possibilities of being which only exclude the self-contradictory from their domain. Thus, the philosophy of Spinoza neither obliges him to believe in the monsters of mythology nor in the miracles of Scripture, nor in the dogmas of Catholic theology, nor even in free-will; nor, again, would it oblige him to reject by anticipation the marvels of modern science. For, according to him, the impossibility of really incredible things could be deduced with the certainty of mathematical demonstration from the law of contradiction itself.
Hegel has given the name of acosmism, or negation of the world, to this form of pantheism, interpreting it as a doctrine that absorbs all concrete reality and individuality in the absolute unity of the divine essence. No misconception could be more complete. Differentiation is the very soul of Spinoza's system. It is, indeed, more open to the charge of excessive dispersion than of excessive centralisation. Power, which is God's essence, means no more than the realisation through all eternity of all possibilities of existence, with no end or aim but just the process of infinite production itself. There is, indeed, a nominal identification between the material processes of Extension and the ideal processes of Thought. But this amounts to no more than a re-statement in abstract terms of the empirical truth that there is a close connection between body and mind. Like the double-aspect theory, the parallelistic theory, the materialistic theory, the theory of interaction, and the theory of more or less complete reciprocal independence, it is a mere verbalism, telling us nothing that we did not know before. Or, if there
is more, it consists of the very questionable assumption that body and mind must come in somewhere to fill up what would otherwise be blank possibilities of existence. And this, like other metaphysical assumptions, is an illegitimate generalisation from experience. The ideas of space and time as filled-up continua supply the model on which the whole universe must be constructed. Like them, it must be infinite and eternal, but, so to speak, at a higher power; as in them, every part must be determined by the position of all other parts, with the determination put at a logical instead of at a descriptive value; corresponding to their infinitely varied differentiation of position and quantity, there must be an infinite differentiation of concrete content; and, finally, the laws of the universe must be demonstrable by the same à priori mathematical method that has been so successfully applied to continuous quantity.
The geometrical form into which Spinoza has thrown his philosophy unfortunately restricts the number of readers—always rather small—that it might otherwise attract. People feel themselves mystified, wearied, and cheated by the appearance, without the reality, of logical demonstration; and the repulsion is aggravated by the barbarous scholasticism with which—unlike Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes—he peppers his pages. Yet, like the Greek philosophers, he is much more modern, more on the true line of developing thought than they are. But to get at the true kernel of his teaching we must, like Goethe, disregard the logical husks in which it is wrapped up. And, as it happens, Spinoza has greatly facilitated this operation by printing his most interesting and suggestive discussions in the form of Scholia, Explanations, and Appendices. Even
these are not easy reading; but, to quote his own pathetic words, "If the way of salvation lay ready to hand, and could be found without great toil, would it be neglected by nearly everyone? But all glorious things are as difficult as they are rare."
Some of his expositors have called Spinoza a mystic; and his philosophy has been traced, in part at least, to the mystical pantheism of certain medieval Jews. In my opinion this is a mistake; and I will now proceed to show that the phrases on which it rests are open to an interpretation more consistent with the rational foundations of the whole system.
The things that have done most to fasten the character of a mystic on Spinoza are his identification of virtue with the knowledge and love of God, and his theory—so suggestive of Christian theology at its highest flight—that God loves himself with an infinite love. That, like Plato and Matthew Arnold, he should value religion as a means of popular moralisation might seem natural enough; but not, except from a mystical motive, that he should apparently value morality merely as a help to the religious life. On examination, however, it appears that the beatific vision of this pantheist offers no experience going beyond the limits of nature and reason. Since God and the universe are one, to know God is to know that we are, body and soul, necessary modes of the two attributes, Extension and Thought, by which the infinite Power which is the essence of the universe expresses itself for us. To love God is to recognise our own vitality as a portion of that power, welcoming it with grateful joy as a gift from the universe whence we come. And to say that God loves himself with an infinite love is merely to say that the attribute of Thought eternally divides itself among an infinity of
thinking beings, through whose activity the universe keeps up a delighted consciousness of itself.
Spinoza declares by the very name of his great work that for him the philosophical problem is essentially a problem of ethics, being, indeed, no other than the old question, first started by Plato, how to reconcile disinterestedness with self-interest; and his metaphysical system is really an elaborate mechanism for proving that, on the profoundest interpretation, their claims coincide. His great contemporary, Hobbes, had taught that the fundamental impulse of human nature is the will for power; and Spinoza accepts this idea to the fullest extent in proclaiming Power to be the very stuff of which we and all other things are made. But he parts company with the English philosopher in his theory of what it means. On his view it is an utter illusion to suppose that to gratify such passions as pride, avarice, vanity, and lust is to acquire or exercise power. For strength means freedom, self-determination; and no man can be free whose happiness depends on a fortuitous combination of external circumstances, or on the consent of other persons whose desires are such as to set up a conflict between his gratification and theirs. Real power means self-realisation, the exercise of that faculty which is most purely human—that is to say, of Thought under the form of reason.
In pleading for the subordination of the self-seeking desires to reason Spinoza repeats the lessons of moral philosophy in all ages and countries since its first independent constitution. In connecting the interests of morality with the interests of science as such, he follows the tradition of Athenian thought. In interpreting pantheism as an ethical enthusiasm of the universe he returns to the creed of Stoicism, and