grate at which he prepares his victuals, the coals which he makes use of for that purpose, dug from the bowels of the earth, and brought to him perhaps by a long sea and a long land carriage, all the other utensils of his kitchen, all the furniture of his table, the knives and 5 forks, the earthen or pewter plates upon which he serves up and divides his victuals, the different hands employed in preparing his bread and his beer, the glass window which lets in the heat and the light, and keeps out the wind and the rain, with all the knowledge and artic requisite for preparing that beautiful and happy invention, without which these northern parts of the world could scarce have afforded a very comfortable habitation, together with the tools of all the different workmen employed in producing those different conveni-15 ences; if we examine, I say, all these things, and consider what a variety of labor is employed about each of them, we shall be sensible that without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, 20 even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated. Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet 25 it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European Prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African King, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of 30 ten thousand naked savages.

VIII.

The Doctrines of Spinoza.

JOSIAH ROYCE, 1855

The following exposition of the doctrines of Spinoza, from the end of the second lecture of Professor Josiah Royce's "The Spirit of Modern Philosophy," Boston, 1893, is reprinted by the kind permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. The beginning is abrupt, and in fact the whole extract loses somewhat, because it is wrenched from the context. Just before this the lecturer has been speaking of Spinoza's attitude toward God as one of "mystic adoration."

The piece is not of a kind from which the meaning can be hastily skimmed, for the subject-matter is abstract, metaphysical, and accordingly hard to express. This difficulty, however, Professor Royce has largely overcome by the use of such concrete images as that of the circle and its diameters. The selection is interesting also as a summary of parts of Spinoza's writing. In this summary two methods, each valuable in its way, are employed that of restating the original in new words and with new illustrations; and that of giving something of what may be called the color and effect of the original by the use of bits of quotation.

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V.

Spinoza is n't a man of action; his heroism, such as it is, is the heroism of contemplation. He is not always, let me tell you, in his religious mood; and when he is not, he appears as a cynical observer of the vanity of

mortal passions. But as religious thinker, he is no cynic. Unswervingly he turns from the world of finite hopes and joys; patiently he renounces every sort of worldly comfort; even the virtue that he seeks is not the virtue of the active man. There is one good thing, 5 and that is the Infinite; there is one wisdom, and that is to know God; there is one sort of true love, and that is the submissive love of the saintly onlooker, who in the solitude of reflection sees everywhere an all-pervading law, an all-conquering truth, a supreme and irre- 10 sistible perfection. Sin is merely foolishness; insight is the only virtue; evil is nothing positive, but merely the deprivation of good; there is nothing to lament in human affairs, except the foolishness itself of every lamentation. The wise man transcends lamentation, 15 ceases to love finite things, ceases therefore to long and to be weary, ceases to strive and to grow faint, offers no foolish service to God as a gift of his own, but possesses his own soul in knowing God, and therefore enters into the divine freedom, by reason of a clear 20 vision of the supreme and necessary laws of the eternal world.

This, then, is the essence of Spinoza's religion. He begins his essay on the "Improvement of the Understanding " with words that we now are prepared to com- 25 prehend. This essay and the fifth part of the ethics show us Spinoza's religious attitude and experience, elsewhere much veiled in his works. "After experience had taught me," says the essay, "that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing 30 that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad, except in so far as

the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there might be anything of which the discovery 5 and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness." Here is the starting-point. Life for Spinoza is in the ordinary world a vain life, because, for the first, it is our thinking that makes the things about us good or bad to us, and not Io any real value of the things themselves, whilst the transiency, the uncertainty of these finite things brings it about that, if we put our trust in them, they will erelong disappoint us. Rapidly, from this beginning, Spinoza rehearses the familiar tale of the emptiness of 15 the life of sense and worldliness, the same tale that all the mystics repeat. The reader, who has never felt this experience of Spinoza and of the other mystics, always feels indeed as if such seeming pessimism must be largely mere sour-heartedness, or else as if the expres20 sion of it must be pure cant. But after all, in the world of spiritual experiences, this, too, is a valuable one to pass through and to record. Whoever has not sometime

fully felt what it is to have his whole world of finite ambitions and affections through and through poisoned, 25 will indeed not easily comprehend the gentle disdain with which Spinoza, in this essay, lightly brushes aside pleasure, wealth, fame, as equally and utterly worthless. We know, indeed, little of Spinoza's private life, but if we should judge from his words we should say that as 30 exile he has felt just this bitterness, and has conquered it, so that when he talks of vanity he knows whereof he speaks. People who have never walked in the gloomy

outlying wastes of spiritual darkness have never had the chance to find just the sort of divine light which he finally discovered there. These mystics, too, have their wealth of experience; don't doubt their sincerity because they tell a strange tale. Don't doubt it even 5 if, like Spinoza, they join with their mysticism other traits of the wonderful Jewish character,-shrewd cynicism, for instance. When they call pleasure and wealth and fame all dust and ashes, they possibly know whereof they speak, at least, as far as concerns themselves alone. I Spinoza, at any rate, twice in his life, refused, if his biographers are right, the offered chance to attain a competency. He declined these chances because, once for all, worldly means would prove an entanglement to him. He preferred his handicraft, and earned his liv- 15 ing by polishing lenses. Steadfastly, moreover, as we know, he refused opportunities to get a popular fame, and even to make a worthily great name. The chief instance is his refusal of the professorship which the Elector Palatine offered him in 1673 at Heidelberg, 20 under promise of complete freedom of teaching, and with the obvious chance of an European reputation. So Spinoza did not merely call the finite world names, as many do; he meant his word, and he kept it. He was no sentimentalist, no emotional mystic. He was 25 cool-headed, a lover of formulas and of mathematics; but still he was none the less a true mystic.

Well, he finds the finite vain, because you have to pursue it, and then it deceives you, corrupts you, degrades you, and in the end fails you, being but a fleet-30 ing shadow after all. "I thus perceived," he says, "that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled