Part 5

“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.”

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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.

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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.”

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