Eternity, according to Spinoza, is not merely a long time: it is really a mode of thought, and cannot be reduced to measurements of time. That is strangely like what one hears from countless pulpits to-day, if the occupants thereof have opened their ears to modern thought. We are living in eternity to-day, and should act as if our actions were to be eternal. Still speaking mystically, heaven is to be a good man; hell is to be a bad man. There can be nothing worse even if we do know what is happening to us after death. And no better man ever lived upon the earth than the despised little Jew, Spinoza. Except for fear of being accused of perpetrating an epigram upon a most solemn subject, I might say that it is better to be God-intoxicated with Spinoza than priest-intoxicated with the various unphysiological Christian creeds. T. H. Huxley, who was accused of all sorts of nonsense, recognised that it was necessary to create an ideal Jesus for man, because, as the critics have shown, owing to the intervention of very imperfect men, we do not really know what were His real teachings; still, we must make an ideal for ourselves; and for every man his own religion must lie between himself and his God, or it is no religion. But so long as it leads to tolerance, mercy, loving-kindness, and duty, he cannot go far wrong. All these things were taught by Spinoza, and, so far as we know, by Jesus Christ.
But possibly the recent discovery of the unconscious mind may have cast a doubt even upon the stately pantheism of Spinoza. Possibly what he took to be the attributes of God are in reality purely human conceptions. Possibly animals, being so much more under the influence of the unconscious mind than men are, do not feel as we do, and there may not be so much cruelty in the world as we suppose. We know that in men the unconscious mind was the first to be evolved, and certainly it is the last to die.[28] To that extent at least may we give thanks to God, and as George Santayana says in his essay on Spinoza to all the little men who have sneered at Spinoza: “I do not believe you; God is great.”
But if Spinoza was the greatest of philosophers we must also remember that he was one of the first, if not the very first, of the critics of the Bible who endeavoured to see that wonderful book through clear glasses, through spectacles that were properly ground, because he had ground them himself. He had not the advantage of modern physiology and psychology, whereby we know that a book, written by men in a state of semi-savagery, such as Moses and the other supposed authors of the Pentateuch, must reflect their semi-savage minds and the thickened cerebral arteries which must have been theirs if they were so old as tradition states. None the less he came to very much the same conclusions as have been reached by the most learned and scientific of modern commentators. As the doctrine of evolution has cast a doubt amounting to certainty upon the story of creation, so Spinoza, by reason of his intellectual love of God, has cast a doubt upon the theory of a personal God, of an all-wise and all-loving Father. The existence of evil in the world, so ever-present, so clamant, so insistent, by itself disproves the existence of such a personality. Where was the fatherly God of the deists when the late war broke out? Perchance he slept or was gone on a journey. Such an absentee God is no God for modern man. By recognising that evil, if, and so far as it exists, must be part of God himself, Spinoza fell in absolutely with modern thought, only he lived three hundred years too soon. But the discovery, or hypothesis, of the unconscious mind, has had still more startling effects upon philosophy; for who can now say that he is not unconsciously listening to the voice of his grandmother when he is formulating his most earnest conclusions? Those sanguine persons, mostly politicians who state proudly that they are satisfied to remain undisturbed with the beliefs that they have learned at their mother’s knee, are probably unconsciously retailing the beliefs that she in her turn learned from her mother, and she from hers. Beliefs acquired in very early youth remain till the end of life as if they were divine; Gibbon has shown the debt that the early Church owed to women, who were doubtless the contemporary mothers and grandmothers and had the maternal mind; dear, amiable, credulous, superstitious creatures they were, though perhaps a trifle narrow-minded. Undoubtedly these women were not persons of critical and scientific mind, though to every one of their sons and grandsons they must have seemed to speak with awful “respectability,” just as old ladies do to this very day. It has been very well said that whenever one feels a conviction of absolute certainty approximating to the divine, one is probably listening to the still small voice of the “herd” speaking through one’s unconscious memory; and common experience is that the herd generally speaks most emphatically through the dulcet tones of that dear old lady, that real transmitter of the herd ideas of past generations, the grandmother. She, not Spinoza, nor Nietzsche, nor Darwin, nor Schopenhauer, has been the real maker of thought to the present day.
Let Spinoza and Nietzsche go hang as abominations unto the Lord, atheists and capable of the utmost wickedness—but not of sectarian wars and wholesale tortures and burnings. And as for Voltaire—one simply shudders at his ribaldry and irrepressible mockery of so-called religion which caused savage persecution in the name of the best and most merciful of men—Jesus Christ. To that extent at least l’infame has passed away, largely owing to Voltaire, though personally he could not have been a very nice man if all tales are true. But certain sects are still willing to apply another form of torture than thumbscrew, rack and stake to those who dare to differ in opinion from their grandmothers.
I see that I have omitted the most mystical of Spinoza’s conceptions. God, besides having the attributes mentioned, has infinite substance. That was really why they turned him out of the synagogue, and would have liked to burn him if they could. The idea of giving a body to God whom St. John defined as an emotion! God is Love! Nowadays the identification of matter with electricity and the modern conception of the ether is the nearest that science can reach to Spinoza’s dreamings, but that in no way detracts from his extraordinary insight into the universe. Even taking Spinozism in its most material aspect, we find that the more we extend the bounds of the known universe the greater it becomes, until infinity seems to become rather more than a mere mathematical conception denoted by a mathematical symbol.
What we gain from Spinoza then—and the best of men, the best of the clergy, agree—is that eternity is a state of mind; that is to say, it is a purely human conception. Perhaps if we go further and say that good and evil, instead of being attributes of the infinite God, are also purely human conceptions, we shall come still nearer to absolute truth.
But quite clearly the notion of God as an all-wise and all-loving Father is inconsistent with medical experience. The only decent thing nature has done for man is to give us our unconscious minds, without which we should be stunned and maddened by the intolerable thunder of our hearts, the rushing through our arteries, the incessant dripping of our kidneys and even more uncomely internal parts. And the way nature has treated woman is still more shocking. Any earthly father who treated his children as nature has treated woman would be considered rather as a stepfather.
Nowadays Spinoza’s pantheism suggests to scientific men the mighty forces that lie locked up within the atom.[29] So far as we know, the universe, however vast it may be, is, in the last resource, composed of atoms. But once again, and fifty times over, I would most strenuously say that pantheism is a philosophy: it is not a religion. It is too stern, too scientific, too consistent with known facts, ever to attract the countless bruised hearts, relics of the late war, longing for comfort in their grief.
Even otherwise intelligent men often ask me whether the Religio Medici of Sir Thomas Browne really represents the religion of modern doctors. The nearest approach to a talk about religion I have ever heard from a doctor was once when I heard one doctor say of another that he was believed to pray for his patients; but in that I seem to scent a savour of professional jealousy. Otherwise I might almost feel justified in saying that Religio Medici is generally considered by doctors to be a farrago of quackery, mysticism, credulity, and astrology, put into gorgeous and quite unnecessarily obscure language; full of sound and fury; signifying nothing. Probably Browne was unconsciously remembering the teachings of some old lady who had impressed the truth upon him in his early infancy—probably with her slipper.
But I cannot close this essay upon the greatest of all philosophers better than by repeating the words of Ernest Renan upon him when they dedicated the great statue at The Hague in 1882: “Woe unto him who in passing should hurl an insult at this gentle and pensive head. He would be punished, as all vulgar souls are punished, by his own vulgarity, and by his incapacity to conceive what is divine. This man from his granite pedestal will point out to all men the way of blessedness which he had found; and ages hence the cultivated traveller, passing by this spot, will say in his heart, ‘The truest vision man ever had of God, came perhaps, here.’”