All men endeavor after continuance of existence (III. prop. 6); why not all after virtue? If all endeavor after it, why do so few reach the goal? Whence the sadly large number of the irrational, the selfish, the vicious? Whence the evil in the world? Vice is as truly an outcome of "nature" as virtue. Virtue is power, vice is weakness; the former is knowledge, the latter ignorance. Whence the powerless natures? Whence defective knowledge? Whence imperfection in general?
The concept of imperfection expresses nothing positive, nothing actual, but merely a defect, an absence of reality. It is nothing but an idea in us, a fiction which arises through the comparison of one thing with another possessing greater reality, or with an abstract generic concept, a pattern, which it seems unable to attain. That concepts of value are not properties of things themselves, but denote only their pleasurable or painful effects on us, is evident from the fact that one and the same thing may be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent: the music which is good for the melancholy man may be bad for the mourner, and neither good nor bad for the deaf. Knowledge of the bad is an abstract, inadequate idea; in God there is no idea of evil. If imperfection and error were something real, it would have to be conceded that God is the author of evil and sin. In reality everything is that which it can be, hence without defect: everything actual is, in itself considered, perfect. Even the fool and the sinner cannot be otherwise than he is; he appears imperfect only when placed beside the wise and the virtuous. Sin is thus only a lesser reality than virtue, evil a lesser good; good and bad, activity and passivity, power and weakness are merely distinctions in degree. But why is not everything absolutely perfect? Why are there lesser degrees of reality? Two answers are given. The first is found only between the lines: the imperfections in the being and action of individual things are grounded in their finitude, particularly in their involution in the chain of causality, in virtue of which they are acted on from without, and are determined in their action not by their own nature only, but also by external causes. Man sins because he is open to impressions from external things, and only superior natures are strong enough to preserve their rational self-determination in spite of this. The other answer is expressly given at the end of the first part (with an appeal to the sixteenth proposition, that everything which the divine understanding conceives as creatable has actually come into existence). "To those who ask why God did not so create all men that they should be governed only by reason, I reply only: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature were so ample as so suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intellect." All possible degrees of perfection have come into being, including sin and error, which represent the lowest grade. The universe forms a chain of degrees of perfection, of which none must be wanting: particular cases of defect are justified by the perfection of the whole, which would be incomplete without the lowest degree of perfection, vice and wickedness. Here we see Spinoza following a path which Leibnitz was to broaden out into a highway in his Theodicy. Both favor the quantitative view of the world, which softens the antitheses, and reduces distinctions of kind to distinctions of degree. Not till Kant was the qualitative view of the world, which had been first brought into ethics by Christianity, restored to its rights. An ethics which denies freedom and evil is nothing but a physics of morals.
In his theory of the state Spinoza follows Hobbes pretty closely, but rejects absolutism, and declares democracy, in which each is obedient to self-imposed law, to be the form of government most in accordance with reason. (So in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, while in the later Tractatus Politicus he gives the preference to aristocracy.) In accordance with the supreme right of nature each man deems good, and seeks to gain, that which seems to him useful; all things belong to all, each may destroy the objects of his hate. Conflict and insecurity prevail in the state of nature as a result of the sensuous desires and emotions (homines ex natura hostes); and they can be done away with only through the establishment of a society, which by punitive laws compels everyone to do, and leave undone, that which the general welfare demands. Strife and breach of faith become sin only in the state; before its formation that alone was wrong which no one had the desire and power to do. Besides this mission, however, of protecting selfish interests by the prevention of aggression, the civil community has a higher one, to subserve the development of reason; it is only in the state that true morality and true freedom are possible, and the wise man will prefer to live in the state, because he finds more freedom there than in isolation. Thus the dislocation of concepts, which is perceptible in Spinoza's ethics, repeats itself in his politics. First, virtue is based on the impulse of self-preservation and the good is equated with that which is useful to the individual; then, with a transformation of mere utility into "true" utility, the rational moment is brought in (first as practical prudence, next as the impulse after knowledge, and then, with a gradual change of meaning, as moral wisdom), until, finally, in strange contrast to the naturalistic beginning, the Christian idea of virtue as purity, self-denial, love to our neighbors and love to God, is reached. In a similar way "Spinoza conceives the starting point of the state naturalistically, its culmination idealistically."[1]
[Footnote 1: C. Schindler in his dissertation Ueber den Begriff des Guten und Nützlichen bei Spinoza, Jena, 1885, p. 42, a work, however, which does not penetrate to the full depth of the matter. Cf. Eucken, Lebensanschauungen, p. 406.]
The fundamental ideas of the Spinozistic system, and those which render it important, are rationalism, pantheism, the essential identity of the material and spiritual worlds, and the uninterrupted mechanism of becoming. Besides the twisting of ethical concepts just mentioned, we may briefly note the most striking of the other difficulties and contradictions which Spinoza left unexplained. There is a break between his endeavor to exalt the absolute high above the phenomenal world of individual existence, and, at the same time, to bring the former into the closest possible conjunction with the latter, to make it dwell therein—a break between the transcendent and immanent conceptions of the idea of God. No light is vouchsafed on the relation between primary and secondary causes, between the immediate divine causality and the divine causality mediated through finite causes. The infinity of God is in conflict with his complete cognizability on the part of man; for how is a finite, transitory spirit able to conceive the Infinite and Eternal? How does the human intellect rise above modal limitations to become capable and worthy of the mystical union with God? Reference has been already made to the twofold nature of the attributes (as forms of intellectual apprehension and as real properties of substance) which invites contradictory interpretations.
3. %Pascal, Malebranche, Bayle.%
Returning from Holland to France, we find a combination of Cartesianism and mysticism similar to that which we have noticed in the former country. Under Geulincx these two forces had lived peacefully together; in Spinoza they had entered into the closest alliance; with Blaise Pascal (1623-62), the first to adopt a religious tendency, they came into a certain antithesis. Spinoza had taught: through the knowledge of God to the love of God; in Pascal the watchword becomes, God is not conceived through the reason, but felt with the heart. After attacking the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters, and unveiling the worthlessness of their casuistical morality, Pascal, constrained by a genuine piety, undertook to construct a philosophy of Christianity; but the attempt was ended by the early death of the author, who had always suffered under a weak constitution. Fragments of this work were published by his friends, the Jansenists, under the title, Thoughts on Religion, 1669, though not without mediating alterations. The Port-Royal Logic (The Art of Thinking, 1662), edited by Arnauld and Nicole, was based on a treatise of Pascal. His thought, which was not distinguished by clearness, but by depth and movement, and which, after the French fashion, delighted in antitheses, was influenced by Descartes, Montaigne, and Epictetus. He, too, finds in mathematics the example for all science, and holds that whatever transcends mathematics transcends the reason. By the application of mathematics to the study of nature we attain a mundane science, which is certain, no doubt, and which makes constant progress,[1] but which does not satisfy, since it reveals nothing of the infinite, of the whole, without which the parts remain unintelligible. Hence all natural philosophy together is not worth an hour's toil. Pascal consoles himself for our ignorance concerning external things by the stability of ethics.
[Footnote 1: It is this uninterrupted progress which raises the reason above the operations of nature and the instincts of animals. While the bees build their cells to-day just as they did a thousand years ago, science is continually developing. This guarantees to us our immortal destiny.]
The leading principles of his ethics are as follows: In sin the love to God created in us has left us and self-love has transgressed its limits; pride has delivered us over to selfishness and misery. Our nature is corrupted, but not beyond redemption. In his actions worthless and depraved, man is seen to be exalted and incomprehensible in his ends; in reality he is worthy of abhorrence, but great in his destination. No philosophy or religion has so taught us at once to know the greatness and the misery of man as Christianity: this bids him recognize his low condition, but at the same time to endeavor to become like God. We must humbly despise the world and renounce ourselves; in order to love God, we must hate ourselves. Moral reformation is an act of divine grace, and the merit of human volition consists only in not resisting this. God transforms the heart by a heavenly sweetness, grants it to know that spiritual pleasure is greater than bodily pleasure, and infuses into it a disgust at the allurements of sin. Virtue is finding one's greatest happiness in God or in the eternal good. As morality is a matter of feeling, not of thought, so God, so even the first principles on which the certitude of demonstration depends, are the object, not of reason, but of the heart. That which certifies to the highest indemonstrable principles is a feeling, a belief, an instinct of nature: les principes se sentent. As a defender of the needs and rights of the heart, Pascal is a forerunner of the great Rousseau. His depreciation of the reason to exalt faith establishes a certain relationship with the skeptics of his native land, among whom Cousin has unjustly classed him (Études sur Pascal, 5th ed., 1857).[1]
[Footnote 1: Of the works on Pascal we may mention that of H. Reuchlin, 1840: Havet's edition of the Pensées, with notes, Paris, 1866; and the Étude by Ed. Droz, Paris, 1886.]