No; better the insecurity of freedom than the security of bondage. Better the dangers that come of the ignorance of majorities than those that flow from the concentration of power in the hands of an inevitably self-seeking minority. Even secret diplomacy is worse than the risks of publicity. “It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs be conducted in secret.... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead.... Better that right counsels be known to enemies, than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.... It is folly to choose to avoid a small loss by means of the greatest of evils.”[116]
This is but one of many passages in Spinoza that startle the reader with their present applicability and value. There is in the same treatise a plan for an unpaid citizen soldiery, much like the scheme adopted in Switzerland; there is a plea against centralization and for the development of municipal pride by home rule and responsibility; there is a warning against the danger to democracy involved in the territorial expansion of states; and there is a plan for the state ownership of all land, the rental from this to supply all revenue in time of peace. But let us pass to a more characteristic feature of Spinoza’s political theory, and consider with him the function of intelligence in the state.
IX
Democracy and Intelligence
“There is no single thing in nature which is more profitable to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.”[117] Such a man, to begin with, has made his peace with the inevitable, and accepts with good cheer the necessary limitations of social life. He has a genial sense of human imperfections, and does not cushion himself upon Utopia. He pursues his own ends but with some perspective of their social bearings; and he is confident that “when each man seeks that which is [really] profitable to himself, then are men most profitable to one another.”[118] He knows that the ends of other men will often conflict with his; but he will not for that cause make moral phrases at them. He feels the tragedy of isolated purposes, and knows the worth of coöperation. As he comes to understand the intricate bonds between himself and his fellows he finds ever more satisfaction in purposes that overflow the narrow margins of his own material advantage; until at last he learns to desire nothing for himself without desiring an equivalent for others.[119]
Given such men, democracy follows; such democracy, too, as will be a fulfilment and not a snare. Given such men, penal codes will interest only the antiquarian. Given such men, a society will know the full measure of civic allegiance and communal stability and development. How make such men? By revivals? By the gentle anæsthesia of heaven and the cheap penology of hell? By memorizing catechisms and commandments? By appealing like Comte, to the heart, and trusting to the eternal feminine to lead us ever onward? (Onward whither?) Or by spreading the means of intelligence?
It is at this point that the social philosophy of Spinoza, like that of Socrates, betrays its weaker side. How is intelligence to be spread? Perhaps it is too much to ask the philosopher this question; he may feel that he has done enough if he has made clear what it is which will most help us to achieve our ends. Spinoza, after all, was not the kind of man who could be expected to enter into practical problems; his soul was filled with the vision of the eternal laws and had no room for the passing expediencies of action. His devotional geometry was a typical Jewish performance; there is something in the emotional make-up of the Jew which makes him slide very easily into the attitude of worship, as contrasted with the Græco-Roman emphasis on intellect and control. All pantheism tends to quietism; to see things sub specie eternitatis may very well pass from the attitude of the scientist to the attitude of the mystic who has no interest in temporal affairs. It is the task of philosophy to study the eternal and universal not for its own sake but for its worth in directing us through the maze of temporal particulars; the philosopher must be like the mariner who guides himself through space and time by gazing at the everlasting stars. It is wholesome that the history of philosophy should begin with Thales; so that all who come to the history of philosophy may learn, at the door of their subject, that though stars are beautiful, wells are deep.
X
The Legacy of Spinoza
BUT to leave the matter thus would be to lose a part of the truth in the glare of one’s brilliance. We have to recognize that though Spinoza stopped short (or rather was cut short) at merely a statement of the prime need of all democracies,—intelligence,—he was nevertheless the inspiration of men who carried his beginning more nearly to a practical issue. To Spinoza, through Voltaire and the English deists, one may trace not a few of the thought-currents which carried away the foundations of ecclesiastical power, civil and intellectual, in eighteenth-century France, and left the middle class conscience-free to engineer a revolution. It was from Spinoza chiefly that Rousseau derived his ideas of popular sovereignty, of the general will, of the right of revolution, of the legitimacy of the force that makes men free, and of the ideal state as that in which all the citizens form an assembly with final power.[120] The French Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence go back in part to the forgotten treatises of the quiet philosopher of Amsterdam. To have initiated or accelerated such currents of thought—theoretical in their origin but extremely practical in their issue—is thereby once for all to have put one’s self above the reach of mere fault-finding. One wonders again, as so many have wondered, what would have been the extent of this man’s achievement had he not died at the age of forty-four. When Spinoza’s pious landlady returned from church on the morning of February 21, 1677, and found her gentle philosopher dead, she stood in the presence of one of the great silent tragedies of human history.