How eloquent men can be when they are angry! Spinoza left his native town on that day; he took refuge at the Hague, where he died in 1677, at forty-four years of age.
In reading the pages in which eminent critics have examined Spinoza’s system, one seems to see not the man whose writings are known, but two different men, or rather perhaps several different men; I do not think even the philosopher would have recognised himself in these résumés.
As has been noticed, Spinoza is neither a true Jew nor, apparently, a Christian, since the negation of final causes is as foreign to the spirit of the Old Testament, as his joyous stoicism is to that of the New; some have remembered the words of Novalis: “Spinoza is inebriated with God.” They added that with him the crown of the intellectual love of God was the transport of a soul carried out of itself, but that this transport must have differed from the ecstasies in which so many of the saints of the Christian Church found the supreme delight of the religious life. But amongst Christians what is their conception of the highest beatitude? I see God in His heaven, but my neighbour, where is he? On the one side are the happy, on the other the faulty; we recognise ourselves in each, we see ourselves, we have fellowship with all; painters have so often represented this scene on theological lines, that it is familiar to us; is this really the beatitude we picture to ourselves?
The mental and moral condition of this philosopher lends itself little to analysis; he who has the most carefully studied his views, would be the most diffident in expounding them, having found so many obscure points in them. In any case it is well to remember this circumstance, Spinoza has now been dead more than two hundred years, and the discovery that before speaking it is advisable to know something of the meaning of the words used, dates from yesterday only. Spinoza in his Tractatus theologico-politicus, uses constantly the words prophecy, inspiration, revelation, faith, and theology, and the reader who has sacrificed his rest for several nights that he may know what he means by these five words, ends by acknowledging that his devotion has been in vain. Happily, no one knows better than our philosopher the meaning of the word obedience; this helps the reader; he only regrets that the critics have laid little stress on this crucial point.
Since no man’s writings are capable of being clearly understood if he is isolated from those who have written on similar lines—beginning from Novalis (that poetic and charming writer whose true name was Hardenberg), points of comparison have been established between the Dutch philosopher (Spinoza), the ecstatic Saint Theresa and the enthusiastic Saint Francis d’Assisi. Let us now turn to the more sober genius of Aristotle and see if he will succeed in throwing daylight on the obscure thought of Spinoza.
“Infinity attracts,” this word of Aristotle would have sufficed, but the prince of critics gives a further explanation. “Man is face to face with a truth, and the light lighteth every one that cometh into the world; all who see see the same things, and all that man has seen is true.... God works in us not as a workman who tires himself, but as an all-powerful virtue which acts; He moves as an object of love.”[125]
This opinion of Aristotle is shared by Plato, St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine. A complete unanimity.
When I am sometimes struck by certain truths, dressed in all the brilliance which pure virtues possess, but feeling unable to form a rational whole of these virtues when they are not arranged in an orderly manner, I should often have yielded to discouragement, if I had not read in Bossuet’s Traité du libre arbitre these words: “When we begin to reason, we must first consider this as indubitable, that we may know with complete certainty many things of which we do not understand their corollaries, nor all their results. The first rule of our logic is that we must not abandon truths which we have once known, whatever difficulties may present themselves when we are trying to deal with them; but that we must hold both ends of the chain firmly, although we may not be able to see the middle by which the two ends are linked.”
The Ideas of Plato
A philosopher said to me: “Since we can know nothing of the beyond, let us make a virtue of necessity, and learn exactly what there is on our side of the veil.” The advice is excellent. Astronomy teaches us that perfect order reigns in the sphere studied by that science. The world may be the result of certain chemical combinations which have met by chance; but if chance has introduced order in these chemical combinations, it might as easily derange them and replace them by disorder; yet the astronomers have not succeeded in discovering the least indication of disorder in their domain; that we know positively.