Pages from a Journal with Other Papers

by William Hale White

To the eighteenth proposition, “No one can hate God,” there is a scholium which shows that the problem of pain which Spinoza has left unsolved must have occurred to him. “But some may object that if we understand God to be the cause of all things, we do for that very reason consider Him to be the cause of sorrow. But I reply that in so far as we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion (Prop. 3, pt. 5), that is to say (Prop. 59, pt. 3) it ceases to be a sorrow; and therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do we rejoice.” The third proposition of the fifth part which he quotes merely proves that in so far as we understand passion it ceases to be a passion. He replies to those “who ask why God has not created all men in such a manner that they might be controlled by the dictates of reason alone,” [52] “Because to Him material was not wanting for the creation of everything, from the highest down to the very lowest grade of perfection; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of His nature were so ample that they sufficed for the production of everything which can be conceived by an infinite intellect.” Nevertheless of pain we have no explanation. Pain is not lessened by understanding it, nor is its mystery penetrated if we see that to God material could not have been wanting for the creation of men or animals who have to endure it all their lives. But if Spinoza is silent in the presence of pain, so also is every religion and philosophy which the world has seen. Silence is the only conclusion of the Book of Job, and patient fortitude in the hope of future enlightenment is the conclusion of Christianity.

It is a weak mistake, however, to put aside what religions and philosophies tell us because it is insufficient. To Job it is not revealed why suffering is apportioned so unequally or why it exists, but the answer of the Almighty from the whirlwind he cannot dispute, and although Spinoza has nothing more to say about pain than he says in the passages just quoted and was certainly not exempt from it himself, it may be impossible that any man should hate God.

We now come to the final propositions of the Ethic, those in which Spinoza declares his belief in the eternity of mind. The twenty-second and twenty-third propositions of the fifth part are as follows:—

“In God, nevertheless, there necessarily exists an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity.”

“The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.”

The word “nevertheless” is a reference to the preceding proposition which denies the continuity of memory or imagination excepting so long as the body lasts. The demonstration of the twenty-third proposition is not easy to grasp, but the substance of it is that although the mind is the idea of the body, that is to say, the mind is body as thought and body is thought as extension, the mind, or essence of the body, is not completely destroyed with the body. It exists as an eternal idea, and by an eternal necessity in God. Here again we must not think of that personality which is nothing better than a material notion, an image from the concrete applied to mind, but we must cling fast to thought, to the thoughts which alone makes us what we are, and these, says Spinoza, are in God and are not to be defined by time. They have always been and always will be. The enunciation of the thirty-third proposition is, “The intellectual love of God which arises from the third kind of knowledge is eternal.” The “third kind of knowledge” is that intuitive science which “advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things;” [54] “No love except intellectual love is eternal,” [55a] and the scholium to this proposition adds, “If we look at the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their minds, but they confound it with duration, and attribute it to imagination or memory, which they believe remain after death.” The intellectual love of the mind towards God is the very “love with which He loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity; that is to say, the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself.” [55b] “Hence it follows that God, in so far as He loves Himself, loves men, and consequently that the love of God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one and the same thing.” [55c] The more adequate ideas the mind forms “the less it suffers from those affects which are evil, and the less it fears death” because “the greater is that part which remains unharmed, and the less consequently does it suffer from the affects.” It is possible even “for the human mind to be of such a nature that that part of it which we have shown perishes with its body, in comparison with the part of it which remains, is of no consequence.” [56a]

Spinoza, it is clear, holds that in some way—in what way he will not venture to determine—the more our souls are possessed by the intellectual love of God, the less is death to be dreaded, for the smaller is that part of us which can die. Three parallel passages may be appended. One will show that this was Spinoza’s belief from early years and the other two that it is not peculiar to him. “If the soul is united with some other thing which is and remains unchangeable, it must also remain unchangeable and permanent.” [56b] “Further, this creative reason does not at one time think, at another time not think [it thinks eternally]: and when separated from the body it remains nothing but what it essentially is: and thus it is alone immortal and eternal. Of this unceasing work of thought, however, we retain no memory, because this reason is unaffected by its objects; whereas the receptive, passive intellect (which is affected) is perishable, and can really think nothing without the support of the creative intellect.” [57a] The third quotation is from a great philosophic writer, but one to whom perhaps we should not turn for such a coincidence. “I believe,” said Pantagruel, “that all intellectual souls are exempt from the scissors of Atropos. They are all immortal.” [57b]

I have not tried to write an essay on Spinoza, for in writing an essay there is a temptation to a consistency and completeness which are contributed by the writer and are not to be found in his subject. The warning must be reiterated that here as elsewhere we are too desirous, both writers and readers, of clear definition where none is possible. We do not stop where the object of our contemplation stops for our eyes. For my own part I must say that there is much in Spinoza which is beyond me, much which I cannot extend, and much which, if it can be extended, seems to involve contradiction. But I have also found his works productive beyond those of almost any man I know of that acquiescentia mentis which enables us to live.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE ON THE DEVIL

Spinoza denies the existence of the Devil, and says, in the Short Treatise, that if he is the mere opposite of God and has nothing from God, he is simply the Nothing. But if a philosophical doctrine be true, it does not follow that as it stands it is applicable to practical problems. For these a rule may have to be provided, which, although it may not be inconsistent with the scientific theorem, differs from it in form. The Devil is not an invention of priests for priestly purposes, nor is he merely a hypothesis to account for facts, but he has been forced upon us in order that we may be able to deal with them. Unless we act as though there were an enemy to be resisted and chained, if we fritter away differences of kind into differences of degree, we shall make poor work of life. Spinoza himself assumes that other commands than God’s may be given to us, but that we are unhesitatingly to obey His and His only. “Ad fidem ergo catholicam,” he says, “ea solummodo pertinent, quæ erga Deum obedientia absolute ponit.” Consciousness seems to testify to the presence of two mortal foes within us—one Divine and the other diabolic—and perhaps the strongest evidence is not the rebellion of the passions, but the picturing and the mental processes which are almost entirely beyond our control, and often greatly distress us. We look down upon them; they are not ours, and yet they are ours, and we cry out with St. Paul against the law warring with the law of our minds. Bunyan of course knows the practical problem and the rule, and to him the Devil is not merely the tempter to crimes, but the great Adversary. In the Holy War the chosen regiments of Diabolus are the Doubters, and notwithstanding their theologic names, they carried deadlier weapons than the theologic doubters of to-day. The captain over the Grace-doubters was Captain Damnation; he over the Felicity-doubters was Captain Past-hope, and his ancient-bearer was Mr. Despair. The nature of the Doubters is “to put a question upon every one of the truths of Emanuel, and their country is called the Land of Doubting, and that land lieth off and furthest remote to the north between the land of Darkness and that called the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” They are not children of the sun, and although they are not sinners in the common sense of the word, those that were caught in Mansoul were promptly executed.

There is nothing to be done but to fight and wait for the superior help which will come if we do what we can. Emanuel at first delayed his aid in the great battle, and the first brunt was left to Captain Credence. Presently, however, Emanuel appeared “with colours flying, trumpets sounding, and the feet of his men scarce touched the ground; they hasted with such celerity towards the captains that were engaged that . . . there was not left so much as one Doubter alive, they lay spread upon the ground dead men as one would spread dung on the land.” The dead were buried “lest the fumes and ill-favours that would arise from them might infect the air and so annoy the famous town of Mansoul.” But it will be a fight to the end for Diabolus, and the lords of the pit escaped.