Spinoza, in his strenuous devotion to scientific truth, knowing nothing about the tiny rod-shaped bacillus that was growing in his lungs, led a most unhealthy life. Sometimes for three months together his footsteps would not cross the lintel; he lived a life of asceticism worthy of Nietzsche himself, or of a monk of the Thebaid, though for a very different reason. Eating just enough to keep him alive and no more, cheerful and merry with his friends, averse from all political and religious contention, he was proud of only one thing—his self-control. People said that he used to be vastly amused by setting two spiders to fight one another. Of course this story really represents Spinoza’s interest in the weird marriage rights of the Arachnidæ. These are really extraordinarily interesting, and many a thoughtful man has followed them, with the aid of an electric torch, in the dusk of the evening when the sexes conjoin. The female is considerably larger and more powerful than the male; and she sits quietly waiting with a naughty gleam in her bright eyes, at the centre of the web. He, insignificant despicable wretch, dances timidly towards her, two of his paws held out with the caution of a professional pugilist. They meet, he continuing his excessive caution. Then a moment of love, an almost imperceptible caress, and he flees literally for his life with hell at his heels. Should the dutiful wife catch him, woe worth the day for the husband. The wicked creature, having sated her sinful lust, devours him, claw, spinnerets and all. Marriage from the point of view of a spider must be an exciting business. I do not know what are the odds on the escape of the male; but doubtless Spinoza worked them out from his own observations. Personally I should fancy that the male has about an even chance. I have often watched among the mosquitoes only to find after an hour that the male could not approach at all, dare he never so wisely. But I have seen horrid orgies of cannibalism should the husband be a shade too slow. It is feminism in excelsis; she, great, big, hulking brute that she is, cannibalistically eats her dear little mate with his slender and spiderly grace. And likes to do it, too. Fabre thought that it was a sort of religious rite among the Arachnidæ; but let us think better of the race of spiders than that. I have no doubt whatever that it was while Spinoza was watching the spiders at their cannibalistic love-making that the amazing spectacle of the presence of so much cruelty in Nature thrust itself before his mind, and led him to speculate why he, too, a man so good and virtuous, who had never harmed a single living creature in his life, should yet be so ill and coughing and sweating and spitting and falling away to a shadow. It was then probably that he evolved his stately system of pantheism that has so impressed the scientific world. Why should the performance of a purely natural function, one which God has implanted in the spiders that they might propagate their species, be attended with such savagery? This story about Spinoza is told by Dr. Colerus, the Lutheran divine who afterwards became his biographer. Naturally Colerus misunderstood Spinoza’s scientific enthusiasm, and equally naturally Spinoza, being accused of atheism, was also accused of cruelty as monstrous as that of Domitian in his most palmy days. An atheist in the seventeenth century was known to be capable of all.
There is really little more to tell about the short life of Spinoza. He was offered a post at the University of Heidelberg as professor of philosophy, but politely declined on the score of his health. Probably he did so really because he did not care to set himself in a position where a turn of the wheel of war might put him at the mercy of the hounds of the Inquisition, with their burnings and tortures and auto da fe’s and religious wars. The real call to join his spirit with that of the Immanent God came when he was forty-two years old in 1674. However deeply a man may speculate upon “God, Man, and his well-being”—to name only one of his works—the tubercle bacillus takes no heed of motives, and will ever be ready to attack him if he denies himself food and fresh air. Thus it was that his friends of The Hague went quietly to church one afternoon, doubtless thinking nothing of the troublesome cough from which he had suffered for so long; and that when they returned they did not hear his cheerful voice, for he was lying dead at his spectacle grinding.
He had a short life; we can sum it up in a few words: Spinoza was a good man and he died poor. When they came to look into his effects they found nothing but a very little money, just enough to satisfy his creditors; the tools of his trade and a few lenses, which were afterwards sold as being of great intrinsic value because he had ground them so well.
It was many years before the real worth of the little Hebrew began to dawn upon the world; and then it was not the doctors nor the scientific men to whom it appealed but the poets, for like all true poets he was a mystic. During the eighteenth century, until the French Revolution began to free men’s minds, he was looked upon as an atheist, and even the good-natured Hume, possibly ironically, spoke of his hideous atheistical doctrine. But the poets, in the ecstasy of joy that accompanied the liberation of mankind, saw far otherwise. Goethe begun to understand him, and Novalis, the German hymn-writer, spoke famously of him as a “God-intoxicated man”; a man drunk with the intellectual love of God. Indeed, the very word “love” is too carnal a term to apply to Spinoza’s philosophy. It was probably some such feeling that led people to hesitate deeply before changing the ancient terms “Faith, Hope, and Charity” into “Faith, Hope, and Love,” although Spinoza in his mysticism, and our modern mystic, Professor Freud,[27] would have approved it.
After Novalis came Coleridge and Wordsworth; and thenceforward Spinoza’s fame began rapidly to extend, until it has influenced the whole of modern thought. Benjamin Jowett, in one of his biological sermons delivered in Edinburgh, the home of Calvinism, spoke of him as one of the best men who ever lived, and compared his life to that of John Bunyan, sorrowfully admitting that the tinker would probably have burnt the spectacle-grinder if they could have met.
Like Jowett, Dean Inge also has been touched by the wonder of Baruch the Jew. “Beatitudo non est premium virtutis, sed ipsa virtus,” said Spinoza. “Heaven,” repeats Dean Inge, “is not the reward of virtue; it is virtue itself.” And again speaking of Spinoza, he says, “No thoroughgoing rationalist philosophy can explain the working of a mind in love.”
Accepting as proved that Spinoza’s philosophy has enormously influenced the modern world, let us consider what it really is. Spinoza’s pantheism does not consist, as so many amiable spiritualists seem to think, of a kindly God of mystic light, surrounded by a fluttering crowd of disembodied spirits with a general atmosphere of worship throughout the universe. It is a highly mystical and rather stern philosophy which leads to surprising results and best explains the known facts of life. God is infinite, with attributes of extension and thought; therefore He must embrace all good and all evil. As He is infinite He must be coterminous with the universe in which there can be nothing else but God. In fact, God is reality. God is the universe. Christ, in Spinoza’s view, is a mystical conception Who includes all the gentleness, all the wisdom, all the loving-kindness, of the world. He is the method by which God communicated His will to man. Putting it briefly, Spinoza was a complete monist, who made no distinction whatever between spirit and matter.
The further we extend scientific inquiry the more we confirm Spinoza’s views of the universe. Nebulæ have been discovered whose light takes a million years to reach the earth; so also did Spinoza account for the existence of evil in the world, that it could only exist because God allowed it, and as we cannot understand why God should allow it, the natural corollary must be that it is a part of Himself. As his fellow-Jew Heine said: “All our modern philosophers, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, see through the glasses that Baruch Spinoza ground.”
Spinoza began the revolt against the orthodox conception of a fall from virtue on the part of man; and he was strongly supported by the doctrine of evolution which was the greatest contribution of the nineteenth century to thought. One would have thought that there could be no single educated man in the world to-day who does not firmly believe that man has ascended from an ape-like animal, for one has only to stroll around any decent museum to see the irrefragable proofs in the skulls and prehistoric remains of man who lived far beyond recorded time, long before man had learned to speak or to act with his fellow-man in societies. Yet to this day some obscurantists try to prohibit the teaching of natural selection; as if it mattered! In spite of them natural selection will go on triumphant, however the wilfully blind may rage. But we have passed beyond the stage of natural selection so far as man is concerned. We now live in the age of intellect, the psychozoic age. The little naked, helpless creature that had so stern a fight for existence against the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros has developed a brain such as never was in the world before, and that brain is beginning to take a hand in nature’s game. Evolution is proceeding, not by tooth and claw, not by ravening and bloodshed, but by the discoveries of such men as Luther Burbank, who has revolutionised horticulture; of Henry Ford, who has revolutionised transport; and of our own Australian Farrar, who, by revolutionising wheat-growing, has made it possible for two blades of wheat to grow where one grew before. In the world of ideas evolution is proceeding by the thoughts of such men as Darwin, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and thousands of young biologists. The brain of man will work towards perfection possibly by birth control, sterilisation of the unfit, and beyond all by the elimination of syphilis.
The process of evolution towards righteousness was interrupted for five sad years by the World War, which was due to a stupid misunderstanding of that very doctrine of evolution to which Spinoza’s philosophy had pointed the way. But pantheism must be looked upon, not as a religion, but as a scientific philosophy. As a religion it does not satisfy the heart of man.