(4) It is true, of course, that Spinoza ended,—as far as the logic of his system went,—by “purifying” away not only this animal Individualism, but Spiritual Personality as well, and this because he takes Mathematico-Physical concepts to be as directly applicable and as adequate to Ultimate Reality as are the Ethico-Spiritual categories. We have then to admit that even so rich and rare, so deeply religious a spirit as Spinoza could insist upon purification by the “preliminary Pantheism,” and yet could remain, in theory, the eager exponent of an ultimate Pantheism. Like the Greeks, he not only passes through a middle distance, a range of experience which appears dominated by austere Fate and blind Fortune, but finds Fate even in ultimate Reality. Whilst, however, the Greeks often thought of Fate as superior even to the Gods, Spinoza finds Ultimate Reality to be neither Nature nor Spirit, but simply Being in General, with a Law which is neither Natural nor Spiritual Law, but Law in general. This General Being and General Law then bifurcate, with the most rigorous determinism and complete impartiality, step by step, into parallel and ever co-present manifestations of Nature and of Spirit, and of their respective laws, which, though different, are also each strictly determined within their own series.[460]
(5) But Spinoza’s error here undoubtedly lies in his de facto violent bending (in spite of this theoretical Parallelism) of all Knowledge, Reality, and Life, under the sole Mathematico-Physical categories and method; and in the insistence upon attaining to ultimate Truth by one single bound and with complete adequacy and clearness. And the greatness here consists in the keen and massive sense of three profound truths. He never forgets that Mathematico-Physical Science is rigidly determinist, and that it stands for a certain important truth and penetrates to a certain depth of reality. He never ceases to feel how impure, selfish, petty is the natural man, and how pure, disinterested, noble, can and should be the spiritual personality. And he never lets go the sense that, somehow, that science must be able to help towards this purification.
(6) Now these three truths must be preserved, whilst the Mathematico-Physical one-sidedness and the “one-step” error must be carefully eliminated. And indeed it is plain that only by such elimination can those truths operate within a fully congenial system. For only thus, with a dissimilarity between the Ultimate, Libertarian, Spiritual Reality, and the Intermediate, Determinist, Physico-Mathematical Range, can we explain and maintain the pain, not only of the selfish but also of the true self, in face the Mere Thing; and only thus is all such pain and trouble worth having, since only thus it leads to the fuller development and the solid constitution of an abiding, interior, mental and volitional Personality.
5. Purification of the Personality by the impersonal.
Prof. H. J. Holtzmann has got an eloquent page concerning the kind of Dualism which is more than ever desirable for souls, if they would achieve a full and virile personality in this our day. “It would appear to be the wiser course for us to recognize the incompatibility between merely natural existence and truly personal life, just as it is, in its whole acute non-reconciliation; to insert this conflict into our complete outlook on to Life in its full breadth and depth, and to find the harmonization in God the Infinite, in whom alone such parallels can meet, and not deliberately to blind our right eye or our left, in order to force that outlook into one single aspect,—a degree of unification which, when achieved in this violent manner, would mean for us, at the same time, a point of absolute inertia, of eternal stagnation.” And he then shows how it is precisely the interaction within our minds, feelings, and volitions, of, on the one hand, the boundless world of nature, with its majestic impersonality, and on the other hand, the inexhaustible, indefinitely deeper realm of personal life, as it appears within the stream of human history, which is best adapted to give us some fuller glimpses of the greatness of God and of the specific character of religion.[461]
The religious imagination, mind, heart, and will,—that is to say, the complete, fully normal human being at his deepest,—has thus been more and more forced, by an increasingly articulated experience of the forces and requirements of actual life, to hold and to practise, with ever-renewed attempts at their most perfect inter-stimulation and mutual supplementation, a profoundly costing, yet immensely fruitful, trinity in unity of convictions on this point.
In every time, place, and race, man will continue to be or to become religious, in proportion to his efficacious faith in, and love of, the overflowing reality and worth of the great direct objects of religion,—God and the soul, and their inter-relation in and through the Kingdom of God, the Church, and its Divine-Human Head,—the whole constituting God’s condescension towards and immanence in man, and man’s response and orientation towards the transcendent God.
And again, in every age, place, and race, man will be or will become deeply religious, in proportion to the keenness with which he realizes the immense need of spiritual growth and purification for his, at best, but inchoate personality.
But,—and this third point we must admit, in the precise extension and application given to it here, to be characteristically modern,—man will, (if he belongs to our time and to our Western races, and is determined fully to utilize our special circumstances, lights and trials, as so many means towards his own spiritualization), have carefully to keep in living touch with that secondary and preliminary reality, the Thing-world, the Impersonal Element, Physical Science and Determinist Law. He will have to pass and repass beneath these Caudine forks; to plunge and to replunge into and through this fiery torrent; and, almost a merely animal individual at the beginning and on this side of such docile bendings and such courageous plungings, he will, (if he combines them with, and effects them through, those two other, abiding and ultimate, directly religious convictions), straighten himself up again to greater heights, and will come forth from the torrent each time a somewhat purer and more developed spiritual person than he was before such contraction and purgation.