Short Studies on Great Subjects

by James Anthony Froude

From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had been previously defined as the 'Ens absolute perfectum.'

Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important, however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the Pantheistic system.

As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:—God is an all-perfect Being,—perfection is the idea which we form of Him: existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism we are told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea—as much involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle. A non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral triangle.

It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of anything—Titans, Chimæras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing. With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the matter. Such arguments are but endless petitiones principii—like the self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off ineffectual.

Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his argumentum palmarium in proof of the existence of God), 'the more attributes I assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing.' Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form clearer than this:—The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist (as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told, in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused habits of our own minds.

Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive. As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences. All such reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the nature of things external to ourselves as they really are in their absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked proposition, it must involve a petitio principii. We have a right, however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a triangle were to conceive of him as eminenter triangularis, or a circle to give him the property of circularity.

Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him, modified in this manner or in that. Beyond him there is nothing, and nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence (for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence; and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of God.

Each attribute is infinite suo genere; and it is time that we should know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God, two only, he says, are known to us—'extension,' and 'thought,' or 'mind.' Duration, even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is not even a real thing. Time has no relation to Being, conceived mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, sub quâdam specie æternitatis. But extension, or substance extended, and thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We must not confound extension with body; for though body be a mode of extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself—or, in other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these attributes are produced from God, and in him they have their being, and without him they would cease to be.

Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most admirably indeed is the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that God is the only causa libera; that no other thing or being has any power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation, motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to consider future things as in a sense contingent (see Tractat. Theol. Polit. cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the causa immanens omnium; he is not a personal being existing apart from the universe; but himself in his own reality, he is expressed in the universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to the philosophical language of the time, Spinoza preserves the distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. The first is being in itself, the attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the properties of these attributes. And thus all which is, is what it is by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God is free, because no causes external to himself have power over him; and as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no infringement on God's freedom to say that he must have acted as he has acted, but rather he is absolutely free because absolutely a law himself to himself.

Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics—the book which contains, as we said, the notiones simplicissimas, and the primary and rudimental deductions from them. His Dei naturam, he says, in his lofty confidence, ejusque proprietates explicui. But, as if conscious that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologise, but to show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors lies in our notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret God's action through our own; we speak of his intentions, as if he were a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our convenience we form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which to strive; and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be wicked. But such generic abstractions are but entia imaginationis, and have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the means of being. There is no rebellion against him, and no resistance of his will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent; what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.