BENEDICT DE SPINOZA

1632-1677

“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” These words which bring to a close Spinoza’s masterpiece “Ethics, after the manner of Geometry,” sum up the experience of a life as rare as it was difficult.

But then, the things that make life difficult are so much a question of the nature that accepts or invites them! We may be sure that few, brought to the lap of Lachesis, would have the courage to pick therefrom Spinoza’s lot. To be born of exiled Jews, to be cast off by family and race as an offender against holy traditions, to live then in loneliness among Christians whose faith one does not accept, to die by inches at the age of forty-five,--even as lives go this would hardly be called an easy one. How seriously then must we take the sustaining power of a philosophy which enabled Spinoza, partly accepting, partly inviting his destiny, to lend it an aspect of calm beauty that touches our wonder!

One is tempted to recall the unhappy Bruno; without, tossed and hunted; within, torn by a conflict between a new science at once grand and desolate, and a memory of things lovable but untrue. In him a lofty philosophy was to have quieted this struggle and consoled this isolation but did not, unless indeed it did at that last moment when he stood at his stake in the Field of Flowers.

There is much likeness but an all-important difference between Bruno and Spinoza, whose names a curious fate linked together first in general condemnation, then in general praise. The two were alike in this, that if anything more lonely can be conceived than the fugitive existence of Bruno, it is the monk-like reclusion of Spinoza; if anything more desolate than the infinite wind-swept universe of Bruno, it is this same universe bereft of the quivering life and all-inspiring purpose that Bruno found in it, this world left on our hands a rolling mechanism fatal and purposeless. But the difference is profound. The philosophy, yes, one may boldly say the religion of Spinoza, sustained him from day to day, from hour to hour. Bruno’s was rather the poet’s vision, vivid enough while it lasted, but dispelled by the shock of reality to return only at such moments as that in which his life went out. Is it in the power of a thought, is it in the temperament of a man that this difference lies explained?

Spinoza’s thought, whatever its worth, owned a distinguished lineage. When in 1658 he was excommunicated by the Jews at Amsterdam, he turned with eager curiosity to the learning if not to the faith of the Christians. In particular the Dutch physician, Francis Van den Ende, himself a freethinker, became his teacher and friend. From him Spinoza acquired his knowledge of Latin and German, by him was initiated into the sciences and introduced to the works of Giordano Bruno and of one other destined to play a determining part in his thought, René Descartes--“the father of modern philosophy” as he is sometimes called.

Descartes, whose life overlaps that of Bruno at the one end and of Spinoza at the other, is founder of the school of thought the historian calls Rationalistic. Now a rationalist is obviously enough one who is bent on following his reason, but reason as opposed to what? We think first of reason as opposed to authority and revelation; but although rationalism came inevitably to discard these sources of belief--had already discarded them in the thought of our very Spinoza--the father of rationalism had left some room for both; partly because it might furnish a convenient refuge if the official church with which he desired to live in comfortable relation should press him; partly because Descartes was in one or two respects less of a rationalist than his school.

On the other hand the master was emphatic enough on the distinction between the reason and the senses. It might seem to us moderns that the old saying “seeing is believing,” with its implied prohibition against believing aught that might not be seen, erred, if at all, from a very excess of reasonableness. To Descartes, seeing with the body’s eye was still but flimsy evidence. This organ had too often deceived him to be implicitly trusted, and to back its testimony with that of the other senses,--touch, taste, smell, hearing--was but to multiply unreliable witnesses. Their combined voices might give a certain presumption in favor of their opinion but never an assurance amounting to certainty. Not indeed with the eye of the body but with the eye of the mind could we see truth in its nakedness. But what is this organ, this eye of the mind, and who is to teach us to use it? The mathematicians, Descartes replies, have long possessed it and long used it. It is to them we must turn for instruction.

If we do--if we turn to Euclid, say--we find that the whole complex and difficult body of truth that we call geometry is made to follow from a few simple truths so certain that we call them self-evident. Why should not all truths be susceptible of the same kind of proof? Why should we not be able to find an axiom of axioms whose certainty was no mere matter of observation, and why, if we find it, should we not be able to draw from it all possible truth, as we deduce the theorems of geometry from its axioms?

It was this idea that Descartes followed and it was this idea that Spinoza accepted at his hands: To construct a theory of life that should be no mere summing up of various peoples’ experiences, but should, after the manner of geometry, draw from an indubitable source the certainties of morals and religion no less than the truths of science.

But when we learn what is this axiom of axioms that Spinoza received from Descartes and made the fountain head of all truth, we find ourselves spectators of one of those curious tricks of the human mind that make its history always diverting. It may well seem to us as though rationalism were not so much standing on its reason as standing on its head. For that axiom which is to be the simplest and most certain of all truths, more elementary than that 2 and 2 make 4, or that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points,--that axiom is the very proposition before which most of us find our reason staggering, our faith panting and breathless. That axiom consists of two words: “_God is_.”

I do not propose to develop here the tortured processes of reasoning by which the rationalists were wont to convince themselves that _what_ God is and _that_ He is, were no mere questions of experience. It seemed to them as though the very meaning of God assured his existence. But I question if in the end any of our day would be strongly convinced by their argument about it. The whole matter is of the less importance that Spinoza’s results in the domain of ethics are not so dependent on his method but that one may readily reword the problem of 17th century rationalism in the language of modern science.

Nevertheless it is in the first instance devotion to the method he had received from Descartes that requires Spinoza to differ with his master on two points of the greatest importance to the sequel. This God, this “all-perfect being” as the rationalists commonly defined Him, plays a rather capricious part in Descartes’ thinking. He is represented as the Creator of the physical universe, and in this act of creation as quite arbitrarily choosing this sort of a world rather than another, a world working out a destiny that is not chosen because it is good but is good because it is chosen of _God_. For the rest, what this end may be is beyond the ken of human reason, and after having done homage to the divine purpose Descartes feels at liberty to confine his attention to studying the mechanism and reconstructing the history of nature as we find it.

Here one can imagine Spinoza exclaiming “What! You would follow the guidance of the geometers, deducing all truth from the axiom of God’s existence, and you leave it to God to decide what shall and what shall not follow from his nature!” Do then the axioms of geometry select the theorems they shall establish, accepting some and rejecting others for a motive whether good or bad? No, says Spinoza, God has neither intellect nor will: facts and laws follow from His nature as the properties of a triangle from its definition.

The other element of caprice in Descartes’ final picture of the world is just _man_. He alone of all things occupying a place in God’s universe is not subjected to mechanical law. But how, Spinoza may well ask, can we conceive ourselves to be following the lead of mathematicians if we violate the first principles of their science? Does the geometry of a triangle depend upon the place in which the triangle finds itself? How then can the laws of the behavior of bodies depend upon these bodies being in or out of the human machine? The human body must be determined by the same laws of physics that govern all extended things. “And as for the mind,” Spinoza adds, “the order and connection of its ideas are parallel to the order and connection of the bodily states.”

“There is,” he concludes, “in mind no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to this or that volition by a cause which has itself been determined by another cause, this again by another and so on _in infinitum_.”

* * * * *

That the world reflects God’s choice, that it might to a perfect understanding reveal God’s purpose, that in it the human being is free in body or mind; these are aspects of irrationality which Spinoza is eager to remove from the fair creation of reason. They represent to him last vestiges of vulgar thought of which the master had after all been unable to rid himself. Spinoza is at his best in exposing the psychology of the multitude with its quaint illusions respecting God and man. In the famous appendix to the first book of the Ethics he summons these prejudices as he calls them before the bar of reason: “They all,” he lays it down, “depend on just this one; that men commonly suppose all things in nature to act as they themselves do with a view to some end, nay, even assume that God himself directs all things to some definite end, saying that God has made all things for man, and man that he might worship God. I shall therefore consider this prejudice. I shall inquire in the first place why most persons assent to it and all are by nature so prone to embrace it. In the second place I shall show that it is false; and lastly I shall show how there have sprung from it prejudices respecting good and evil, merit and sin, praise and blame, beauty and ugliness, and other things of the sort....

“It will here suffice to assume certain facts all must admit, namely, that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all men have, and are conscious of having, an impulse to seek their own advantage. From this it follows _first_ that men think themselves free for the reason that they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and, being ignorant of the causes by which they are led to will and desire, they do not so much as dream of these. It follows _second_ that men do everything with some purpose in view; that is, with a view to the advantage they seek. Hence it is they always desire to know the motives of action, and when they have learned these, are satisfied.”

Against this background Spinoza sketches in with a few quick, vigorous strokes what we may call his psychology of popular religion.

“Since men find in themselves,” he writes, “and external to themselves, many things which are of no small assistance in obtaining what is to their advantage, as for example, the eyes for seeing, the teeth for chewing, plants and animals for food, the sun for giving light, and so on, this has led them to regard all things in nature as means to their advantage. And knowing these means to have been discovered, not provided by themselves, they have made this a reason for believing that there is some one else who has provided them for their use. But as they had never had any information concerning the character of this being, they had to judge it from their own. Hence, they maintained that the gods direct all things with a view to man’s advantage, to lay men under obligation to themselves, and to be held in the highest honor; whence it has come to pass that each one has thought out for himself, according to his disposition, a different way of worshipping God, that God might love him above others, and direct all nature to the service of his ... desire. But while they sought to show that nature does nothing uselessly (in other words nothing that is not to man’s advantage) they seem to have shown only that nature and gods and men are all equally mad.”

And Spinoza seizes the opportunity to pay tribute to a respectable, well-worn theology:

“Just see how far the thing has been carried! Among all useful things in nature they could not help finding a few harmful things, as tempests, earthquakes, diseases, etc. They maintained that these occurred because the gods were angry on account of injuries done them by men or on account of faults committed in their worship. And although experience daily contradicted this and showed by an infinity of instances that good and evil fall to the lot of the pious and of the impious indifferently, that did not make them abandon their inveterate prejudice. They found it easier to class these facts with other unknown things whose use they could not name and thus to retain their present and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and think out a new one. Hence they assumed that the judgment of the gods very far surpasses man’s power of comprehension.” This in itself, Spinoza concludes, would have been sufficient to hide the truth forever from mankind had not science, which looks into the why and not the wherefore of things, shown men a different standard of truth.

The second paragraph in which he fulfils his promise to show the folly of the popular belief in a providence is pervaded by a dry humor:

“I must not overlook the fact that the adherents of this doctrine who have chosen to display their ingenuity in assigning final causes to things, have employed in support of their doctrine a new form of argument, namely, a reductio, not ad absurdum, but ad ignorantiam; which shows that there was no other way to set about proving this doctrine. If, for example, a stone has fallen from a roof upon someone’s head and has killed him, they will prove as follows: If it did not fall in accordance with God’s will for this purpose, how could there have been a chance concurrence of so many circumstances?... Perhaps you will answer, It happened because the wind blew and the man had an errand there. But they will insist, Why did the wind blow at that time? and why had that man an errand that way at just that time? If you answer again, The wind rose at that time because on the day before, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to be rough and the man had an invitation from a friend, they will again insist, since one may ask no end of questions, But why was the sea rough? and why was the man invited at that time? And so they will keep on asking the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that asylum of ignorance.... Hence it happens that he who seeks for the true causes of miracles and endeavors like a scholar to comprehend things in nature, and not like a fool to wonder at them, is everywhere regarded and proclaimed an heretic and an impious man by those whom the multitude reverence as interpreters of nature and the gods. But this I leave and pass on to the third point I promised to treat here.”

The treatment of this third point, our perverted notions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, etc., may readily be imagined. “Since men as we have just said believe that everything was made for their sake, they call the nature of a thing good or bad, sound or corrupt, according as it affects _them_.” And from this springs the world-old _problem of evil_ as it is called. “Many are accustomed to reason as follows: If everything has followed from the necessity of God’s most perfect nature, whence so many imperfections in nature, the stinking rottenness of things, their disgusting ugliness, confusion, evil, sin and so forth?” But those who ask thus are merely confused, for “the perfection of things is to be determined solely from their nature and power, nor are things more or less perfect because they please or displease men’s senses, are helpful or harmful to man’s nature.”

* * * * *

Were we to lay aside our Spinoza at this point, we should be inclined to agree with the judgment of most of his contemporaries and of his successors for more than a century, that although the name of God is constantly on his lips his thought makes the name an empty one, that he is at bottom an atheist. Furthermore we should fail to see how he could have called his great work an “ethics,” inasmuch as it is hardly to be understood how in a world where every act of the body is necessitated by eternal laws of physics, every thought of the mind by equally rigid laws of psychology, there could be such a thing as a good or bad act, a good or bad thought. Where there is no freedom, how can there be right and wrong, worth and unworthiness?

And yet we shall find that into this hard inhospitable world-picture, Spinoza has set a theory of life that not only recognizes and defines the difference between the good and the bad, but culminates in a phrase whose religious feeling is unmistakable: Virtue is knowledge; the only knowledge is to know God; to know God is to love him. If one grasp this part of his philosophy, one will understand how it came about that him whom the eighteenth century called atheist, the nineteenth remembered as a _Gottrunkener Mensch_--a God-intoxicated man.

It would be too much to attempt to follow the technical expression that Spinoza gives to his thought. Every word is heavy with the burden of long centuries of scholasticism. But I think it is not impossible to put oneself in possession of one principal idea on which the rest follows, not without jolt, yet with a fair degree of ease.

Let us then put the problem clearly before us. Suppose Nature, including the incident of human life, were one great machine without purpose in the whole, without freedom in the detail, how would it be possible to regard any part of nature, a given man for example, as either good or bad? If this man lives as he must, what use, nay what meaning in advising him how he _ought_ to live?

Spinoza’s answer involves this fundamental point. There are some machines that exist for a purpose. We may, if we choose, regard it as _the nature_ of such a machine to accomplish this purpose. In proportion as it accomplishes it we call it good; in proportion as it fails we call it bad. Thus a clock is mechanical enough, a matter of cogwheels and springs, but that is not _the nature_ of a clock, for we can recognize such an implement without knowing anything about these same cogwheels and springs, if only we know that the thing keeps time. As it keeps accurate time we call it a good clock, and as it loses or gains we call it a bad one. It is true that we do not exactly blame the clock if it goes wrong; we rather blame the clock-maker. But there is no reason why we should cease to blame the clock-maker, were we to convince ourselves that he too was a mechanism, and owed his lack of skill to the physical constitution of hands and brain. In a word, a mechanism whose nature is to perform a certain function may nevertheless be a good or a bad mechanism for the purpose, and is praiseworthy or blameworthy in so far as it performs its function well or ill.

It is only then a mechanism that reveals in its behavior the pursuit of a purpose that may be regarded as good or bad. So too it is only such a mechanism that may be regarded as more or less free, more or less bound. This notion of freedom and bondage that Spinoza here introduces, turns on a distinction which all of us make without realizing the difficulty of defining what we mean by it. It is the distinction between a being and its environment. With respect to each thing Spinoza divides nature into two parts: one part he calls the inner nature of the thing; the other, nature external to it. Now in one use of the term “nature” this distinction seems to be an impossible one; for in so far as I regard a man’s body as composed of atoms obeying the laws of mechanics, everything that takes place among these atoms is the resultant of the relation of these atoms to all others in the universe. “It is impossible,” Spinoza himself sees it--“it is impossible for a man not to be a part of nature and not to follow its general order.”

But suppose in reference to a given kind of body we neglect all those differences in behavior that make neither for nor against the accomplishment of a purpose we have ascribed to it. Will not the grain of corn spring up in this field or in that? Will not the human being pass through the cycle of life in this age and country, or in that? And in so far as he carries out the purposes of his being in various surroundings, whatever difference of detail in his way of doing it, may we not say that man has a nature of his own independent of his environment? Finally is not this just what we mean by being free: the ability to carry out one’s end independently of the circumstances in which one is placed? On the other hand is not an inability to win out under all circumstances just what we mean by bondage?

There is then no reason why we should not recognize freedom and bondage, good and evil, in certain _parts_ of a world that atom by atom is mechanical and purposeless in its constitution.

* * * * *

Having presented this central idea, we may now follow with greater ease Spinoza’s account of the degree of freedom of which a man is capable, of the use of this freedom which we should call good, and finally of the rewards of a “good life.”

Here we seem to have asked three questions because we have followed the general ideas on the subject. To these questions, however, Spinoza would return a single answer. To be good, to be free, to be blessed mean one and the same thing. It is a divine thought, if only it can be made to appear.

First then let us note that we habitually distinguish the forms of life as higher and lower; the grain of corn is lower than the bee, the bee is lower than the man. If we ask ourselves what we mean by this distinction, we shall find I think that we refer to the difference of the degree to which these forms are capable of carrying out a given purpose whatever the environment. The biologist would say they differ in adaptability. Take merely the common end of self-preservation: the grain of corn is lost if it fall on rocky ground or among the thorns. It can do nothing to save itself. To the bee these circumstances are indifferent, yet it in turn would succumb to a blight of the flowers. To the man, this would be but a small matter and we enjoy losing ourselves in admiration of the ingenuity with which he manages to subsist under the most unusual and threatening conditions. In a word, the higher the form of life, the greater the freedom from environment; the lower, the greater the bondage to circumstance.

What now in the future of a thing determines its degree of freedom? Spinoza studies the question only within the domain of human life. Within this domain his answer is striking: Freedom comes with knowledge; ignorance is bondage.

But there is more than one sense in which this saying may be taken. We have for example the Baconian thought, “knowledge is power.” That is, given any end to be striven for, other things being equal the one who brings science to bear is the more likely to conquer circumstances, to triumph, to be free. This sense of the power of knowledge is not lacking in Spinoza.

But the freedom that comes with knowledge may be of a higher kind than the mere bettering of our chances of success. After all, human skill is extremely limited; defeat is every man’s portion, and one of the most important questions in life is how to bear failure.

If knowledge is our best arm to ward off defeat, so is it our best solace when defeat, the inevitable, comes. For do we but understand that the fate that has come upon us was not to be escaped but was imposed by the eternal laws of nature, repining becomes impossible. Pain is a fact, we cannot escape it altogether, we cannot deny it when it has seized us. We _can_ though prevent the sourness and bitterness that the ignorant fall prey to when they suffer. For pain is one thing, hate another. Pain is not to be escaped; hate may be. And the way to kill hate in our hearts is to connect the individual fact that is painful with the whole order of nature which makes this as every other fact necessary. Now the order of nature as we have seen flows from God as the theorems of geometry flow from its axioms. To understand the necessity of any fact is to recognize God as its cause. When we have done this the bitterness of defeat is gone. No man, says Spinoza, can hate God.

I have mentioned two senses in which knowledge meant freedom: (1) the sense in which it reduces the chances of failure and pain to a minimum; (2) the sense in which it frees us from the bondage of passion and bitterness, when the unavoidable remainder of pain comes upon us. There is still one deepest sense in which knowledge is freedom. So far, the excellence of knowledge has been made to depend upon its fitness as a means--either to the end of obtaining a maximum of success, or to the end of bearing the still inevitable minimum of defeat. We have now to consider knowledge as an end in itself.

Since, as we have seen, the pain of life is the sense of defeat, of limitation; its pleasure the sense of triumph, of freedom, we should expect to find Spinoza urging as the blessed way of life that one, if any such there be, which could meet no defeat; that one whose success did not hang upon circumstances in which a man’s life happened to be cast; that life, in a word, that was at each moment absolute freedom.

You will doubtless have anticipated that these blessings are claimed by our philosopher for that way of life which is a single hearted pursuit of knowledge. “Wherefore,” he has written, “the ultimate aim of the man who is controlled by reason, that is, the highest desire with which he strives to restrain all others, is that which impels him adequately to know himself and all other things that can fall within the scope of his understanding.”

And again he has said: “There is nothing in nature that is opposed to the understanding; nothing that can destroy it.” (The word “understanding” replaces the original expression “intellectual love.” We shall see presently that for Spinoza to understand is to love God.)

It is to be regretted that Spinoza did not deal as minutely with the question: Are we free to obtain knowledge, as he did with the thesis: Knowledge when obtained is freedom. For one feels that whatever the blessedness of knowledge, if understanding is denied us we are not blessed. And has not Spinoza himself said that the path to knowledge is a difficult one? And he adds “surely it must be difficult, since it is so rarely found. For if salvation were easily attained and could be found without great labor, how could it be neglected by nearly every one?”

Had Spinoza maintained that not only knowledge but the pursuit of knowledge was blessed, then indeed salvation must lie at every man’s door. For is not life itself one long education? And if it bring its share of disillusionment, may we not repeat the words of a distinguished German scientist of our own day, “All disillusionment is enlightenment”? And this I think is the burden of Spinoza’s teaching: “Let the pain of life teach you to understand and you will not hate life, but in the joy of understanding, love it.”

* * * * *

You will learn to love life! But Spinoza has a loftier word for it: You will learn to love God. A clearing up of this expression may well end our account of the religion of Spinoza. You must recall our saying that for Spinoza and his fellow rationalists, all truths were deducible from the single one “God is,” as all theorems of geometry are proved from its axioms. If the truths respecting triangles follow from the nature of a triangle and are not merely the result of physical measurement, so too, the truths about the world follow from the nature of God and are not merely brute facts that we have to accept because we are continually bumping against them. To understand a particular experience is to recognize God as its cause. But we have seen that such understanding is the greatest happiness that can come to man, for it is his assurance of power, of freedom from pain. Now Spinoza defines love as “pleasure accompanied with the idea of an external cause.” If understanding is pleasure, and if it is at the same time recognition of God as a cause, it fulfils the condition of being love, and of course, love of God. It is this love of God that is at once knowledge, freedom, virtue and blessedness. “For blessedness,” our philosopher has written, “blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we rejoice in it _because_ we restrain our desires, but on the contrary because we rejoice in it we are able to restrain our desires.”

“I know,” he writes, “that the belief of the multitude is different. Most men seem to think that they are free just in so far as they are permitted to gratify desire, and that they give up their independence just in so far as they are obliged to live according to the precept of the divine law.

“Piety, then, and religion and all things without restriction that are referred to as greatness of soul, they regard as burdens; and they hope after death to receive the reward of their bondage, that is, of piety and religion. And not by this hope alone, but also and chiefly by fear--the fear of being punished after death with dire torments--are they induced to live according to the precept of the divine law so far as their poverty and feebleness of soul permit. If men had not this hope and fear, but if on the contrary they thought that minds perished with the body, and that for the wretched, worn out with the burden of piety, there was no continuance of existence, they would return to their inclinations, and decide to regulate everything according to their lusts and to be governed by chance rather than by themselves. This seems to me no less absurd than it would if some one because he does not believe he can nourish his body with good food to eternity should choose to stuff himself with what is poisonous and deadly; or because he sees that his mind is not eternal or immortal should choose on that account to be mad and to live without reason.”

And Spinoza closes his doctrine of life with a calm hymn to science. “I have completed all that I intended to show regarding the power of the mind over the emotions, and the freedom of the mind. From what I have said it is evident how much stronger and better the wise man is than the ignorant man, who is held by mere desire. For the ignorant man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes and never attaining to true satisfaction of the soul, lives as it were without consciousness of himself, of God, and of things, and just as soon as he ceases to be acted upon, ceases to be. While on the contrary the wise man is little disturbed in mind, but conscious by a certain eternal necessity of himself, of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, but is always possessed of true satisfaction of soul. If indeed, the path that I have shown to lead to this appear difficult, yet it may be found, and all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”