Highlights

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  Spinoza denied final causes, or purposes at work in nature

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  he denied the immortality of the soul, free-will, and moral responsibility.

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  he identified nature with God, and taught that all things, whether in the eyes of men they were good or evil, mean or noble, were integral parts of the divine being.

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  This very pantheism, however, was what a little later endeared Spinoza to a group of romantic Germans, who were poetical, emancipated souls and great lovers of nature; so much so that one of them, Novalis, in a famous phrase, pronounced Spinoza a man inebriated with, God

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  To have perceived the relativity of good and evil; and of all human conventions, seemed to these Faust-like spirits a blessed deliverance.

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  The cramped child of civilisation could thereby recover his animal birthright to live as nature prompted; and by the same stroke he could win his speculative liberty to think straight and to speak frankly

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  the universe is non-human, and that man is relative.

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  Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

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  Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. When he attains this dignity all things lose what was threatening and sinister about them, without needing to change their material form or their material influence. Man's intellectual part and his worshipping part have made their peace with the world.

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  His philosophy, although one of the most single-minded and consistent that has ever been framed, actually offered these two aspects to two sorts of people.

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  he was excommunicated by the Synagogue, at the age of

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  twenty, for his heretical opinions; which were that God might have a body (namely, the whole world of matter)

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  founded his philosophy partly on a rationalised Judaism, partly on the system of Descartes, and, in politics, on the system of Hobbes.

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  He declined a chair of philosophy at Heidelberg the better to preserve his full freedom and leisure. He lived abstemiously and alone; yet he cultivated the acquaintance of those who shared his intellectual interests

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  This pervasive piety in his life corresponds admirably with a certain pious phraseology which we find in his works, in the midst of their astonishing boldness of thought and uncompromising rationalism. Those devout phrases were not due to policy, nor to inert habit, but expressed the genuine and ruling sentiment of his mind.

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  It thus enabled him to become the founder of the historical explanation or "higher criticism" of the Bible.

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  He assumes without discussion that the Bible is the word of God, that the Jews are the chosen people

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  when we catch the philosophic intention behind this pious language, we perceive that Spinoza is sounding the very depths of rationalism

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  God, for Spinoza, is simply the universe, in all its extent and with all its details.

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  the mind of God is not God Himself, in His entirety, but only one of His attributes or manifestations. It is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world.

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  The spirit of God, accordingly, means simply the genius of men, the ground of which lies indeed beyond them, in the universal context and influence of nature; but the conscious, expression and fruition of it first arises in them severally, from time to time, as occasion warrants.

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  Prophecy is merely imagination; an imagination which is truthful when, by some instinctive clairvoyance, it divines the tendency of events, or perceives the principles of profitable conduct.

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  The divine authority of Scripture consists in its teaching true virtue.

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  What God promises to a people is what they covet and are able to attain for themselves.

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  Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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  Christ is not a single historic person who possessed, once for all, perfect wisdom and humility. Christ is all wisdom and humility, no matter what person may possess

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  Christ is a mystical name for whatever wisdom is involved, or is possible, in the universe; which wisdom, when it appears in the human race, is called good sense, conscience, or reflection. It is this that is the leaven and the soul of truth in all religions, and the true saviour of mankind.

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  The Bible is literature, not dogma; and this literature is a criticism of life, to the effect that conduct is the chief thing in it, and that the eternal makes for righteousness; or (in Spinoza's language) the sole purpose of revealed religion is to inculcate " obedience." By every imaginative appeal and every legal enactment, the Bible aims at securing good-will, mercy, and peace among men.

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  This is also the aim of Spinoza's own writings about religion and politics, and of his whole philosophy; so that he continues the work of the prophets whom he interprets, and is, in the same sense, a true prophet himself.

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  Toleration is what he wishes to recommend, both to governments and to private sects, on the combined authority of revelation and of reason.

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  Toleration is what the Bible commands, if truly understood, since it commands lovingkindness, peace, and the forgiveness of enemies.

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  Toleration is also what the interests of the state require.

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  Spinoza propounds the principles of liberalism in these matters with remarkable foresight and precision.

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  If acts only could be made the ground of criminal prosecutions, and words were always allowed to pass free, sedition would be divested of every semblance of justification, and would be separated from mere controversies by a hard and fast line.

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  Liberal illusions (if this be one of them) do not, however, characterise Spinoza's political theory as a whole. It has, indeed, been called Machiavellian, and in our day it might be called Nietzschean; but his defence of the maxim that might makes right is free from all tyrannical or aristocratic bias. What he propounds is simply a truth of natural history.

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  A Theologico-political Ireatise, preface. Compare chapter xx. of the same treatise : "What greater misfortune for a state can be conceived than that honourable men should be sent like criminals into exile, because they hold diverse opinions which they cannot disguise? What, I say, can be more hurtful than that men who have committed no crime or wickedness should, simply because they are enlightened, be treated as enemies and put t o death, and that the scaffold, the terror of evil-doers, should become the stage where the highest examples of tolerance arid virtue are displayed to

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  "The law and ordinance of nature, under which all men are born, and for the most part live, forbids nothing but what no one wishes or is able to do, and is not opposed to strifes, hatred, anger, treachery, or, in general, anything that appetite suggests. For the bounds of nature are not the laws of human reason, which do but pursue the true interest and preservation of mankind, but other infinite laws, which regard the eternal order of universal nature, whereof man is an atom; and according to the necessity of this order only are all individual beings determined in a fixed manner to exist and to operate. Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd, or evil, it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason; although, in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not bad as regards the order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own nature taken separately."

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  it sets forth the relativity of good and evil to finite and particular interests, whilst it makes no attempt to call relative evils absolute goods.

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  The very distinction between good and evil is what is transcended in the absolute

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  There is infinite being, no doubt, beyond our human interests and ideals, and, to the contemplative intellect, that being has a certain dignity, because it is great; but its greatness is not moral, its dignity is not human, and to call it "good" would be not a " higher truth" but a silly impertinence.

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  The infinite knows no obligation, it is subject to no standard.

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  Only what can exist can have interests, and only what can have interests can have rights. At least, this is the teaching of Spinoza, one of whose greatest achievements is the way in which he grafts his moral upon his natural philosophy.

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  Such anthropology, although Spinoza calls it ethics, is a matter-of-fact record of the habits and passions of men. It is not the expression of any ideal; it does not specify any direction in which it demands that things should move. Yet it describes the situation which makes the existence of ideals possible and intelligible.

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  Given the propulsive energy of life in any animal that is endowed with imagination, it is clear that whatever he finds propitious to his endeavours he will call good, and whatever he finds hostile to them he will call evil.

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  This competition between a man's passions makes up his moral history, the growth of his character, just as the competition of his ruling interests with other interests at work in society makes up his outward career.

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  The sort of imagination that can survey all these interests at once, and can perceive how they check or support one another, is called reason

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  when reason is vivid and powerful it gives courage and authority to those interests which it sees are destined to success, whilst it dampens or extinguishes those others which it sees are destined to failure.

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  Reason thus establishes a sort of resigned and peaceful strength in the soul, founded on renunciation of what is impossible and cooperation with what is necessary. This resigned and peaceful strength Spinoza calls happiness; and since it rests on apprehension of the order of nature, and acceptance of it, he also calls it, in his pious language, knowledge and love of God.

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  Happiness, in this sense of knowledge and love of the universe, is what all Spinoza's maxims aim to secure

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  they accordingly counsel great moderation in ambition, with a modest and obedient attitude towards the powers that be, whether cosmic or political.

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  illusion and imposture, if we take a broad view, cannot be factors in that radical power to which the wise man bows; on the contrary, they are great sources of instability, conflict, and fear.

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  Spinoza, for all his mildness and submissiveness to legal authority, and even to custom, is uncompromising in the sphere of ideas.

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  The courage and confidence are perfect with which be denounces any government that does not express the organic force of society, or any religion that distorts the natural reason and conscience of man.

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  For in breaking away from the mediaeval Synagogue, and even from the orthodoxy of the Pharisees, Spinoza returned to the essential insights of the prophets, and to the primary instincts of the Hebrew nation. Like a typical reformer or revivalist, he could feel that he was merely reporting afresh an eternal oracle. His radicalism was fervidly pious. His heterodoxy came to him as the word of God.

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  The sanction, in the way of earthly happiness, which Spinoza promised to those who accepted his teaching, was a solid, humble, and legal well-being. It was an exact re-assertion of the sort of hope and aspiration of which the older parts of the Bible are full.

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  This vindication of morality by events was not to be secured by the punctilious performance of sacrifices, nor by faith in any speculative doctrine; it was a natural consequence of the conduct in question, attached to it by the original constitution of the world.

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  Spinoza had a mystical kind of salvation to add to the practical, homely rewards of virtue.

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  Mere reverence for the will of God, mere understanding of the laws of nature (and these two are one for Spinoza), was in itself a possession more precious than rubies.

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  He who truly loves God cannot wish that God should love him in return.

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  The point in religious philosophy at which Spinoza departed most from Jewish ideas, and approached (perhaps unawares) to those of the Greeks, was his doctrine of human freedom and immortality.

Quotes

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Notes

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Annotations

References

Santayana, George. “Introduction.” Ethics, by Benedict de Spinoza, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1910.