William Shakespeare - "Die Irrungen (The Comedy of Errors)"

United States Department of the Interior - "The Nation's River"

F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield - "Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use"

E. V. Lucas - "A Boswell of Baghdad"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects





This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which
continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit
of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with
which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of
him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings
are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most
insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be
otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether
wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will
further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better
part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such
earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in
MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have
discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of
additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary,
rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant
somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only
enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often
that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza
lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but
because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to
exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern
times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world
when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements
which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He
refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself
with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been
taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in
Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the
affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the
endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in
which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'

The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple,
but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his
biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect
a blemish in his character--that, except so far as his opinions were
blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We
desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision
with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in
antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business
is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own
conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of
such a man,--a lesson which he taught equally by example and in
word,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and
goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant
as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of
intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful
language,--'Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum verae fidei
Catholicae signum est, et veri Spiritus Sancti fructus: et ubicumque haec
reperiuntur, ibi Christus re vera est, et ubicumque haec desunt deest
Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiae
et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system
of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him
the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.
Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite
sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either the points of
disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance--or
there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant
under a difference of words--or else the real truth is something
different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is
representing some important element which the others ignore or forget.
In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we
would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success;
Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or
set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether,
we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or
misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will
deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to
produce some effect upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose
to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form
which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with
Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no
unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its
conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at
least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself
thoroughly understood.

And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to
see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was
necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have
called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something
reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott
trunkner Mann_--a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been
quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is
about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.
With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a
Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious,
methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty
years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world
in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as
attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort
after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in
philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions
and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the
conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the
grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has
given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione
Intellectus.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and
full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to
epitomise it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was
his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men,
and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all
in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of
what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting
on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the
experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were
all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and
the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as
it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one
time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the
wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He
desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to
find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We
must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out
of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare
facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as
the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to
find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all
forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the
certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at
all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative
method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which
were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these
_verae ideae_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If
they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be
self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the
illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious
and Platonic.

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require
others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture
those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has
provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude
instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and
others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with
the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided
also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these,
he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything,
and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he
elsewhere divides it, four.

We know a thing--

1. i. _Ex mero auditu_: because we have heard it from some
person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to
question.

ii. _Ab experientia vaga_: from general experience: for
instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through
our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we
are ignorant.

2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the laws
of its phenomena, and see them following in their
sequence in the order of nature.

3. Finally, we know a thing, _ex scientia intuitiva_, which
alone is absolutely clear and certain.

To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth
proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the
second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he
multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He
neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he
seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple
cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not
understand it.

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has
found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.

A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by
simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve
to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or
less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the
third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of
certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very
simplest truths, _non nisi simplicissimae veritates_, can be perceived;
but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and
the true ideas, the _verae ideae_, which are apprehended by this faculty
of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has
furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has
none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their
question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'
All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without
absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are
contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius
scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam
objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat
habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne
tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum
veritatis quaerere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est
via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia illa
idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)

Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth
century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand
conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as
little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some
better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less
pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all
men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say
_is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of
conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We
are to see, however, what these _ideae_ are which are offered to us as
self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce
conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear
strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his
canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled
among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them,
in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_,
and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to
'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps,
be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of
the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--

DEFINITIONS.

1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing
the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which
cannot be conceived except as existing.

2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by
another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is
called finite, because we can always conceive another body
enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by
body.

3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by
itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the
conception of anything else as the cause of it.

4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance
as constituting the essence of substance.

5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in
something else, by and through which it is conceived.

6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of
infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and
infinite essence.


EXPLANATION.

I say _absolutely_ infinite, not infinite _suo genere_--for of what
is infinite _suo genere_ only, the attributes are not infinite but
finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own
essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which
involves no impossibility.

7. That thing is 'free' which exists by the sole necessity of its
own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That
is 'not free' which is called into existence by something else, and
is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite
method.

8. Eternity is existence itself, conceived as following necessarily
and solely from the definition of the thing which is eternal.


EXPLANATION.

Because existence of this kind is conceived as an eternal verity,
and, therefore, cannot be explained by duration, even though the
duration be without beginning or end.

So far the definitions; then follow the


AXIOMS.

1. All things that exist, exist either of themselves or in virtue of
something else.

2. What we cannot conceive of as existing in virtue of something
else, we must conceive through and in itself.

3. From a given cause an effect necessarily follows, and if there be
no given cause no effect can follow.

4. Things which have nothing in common with each other cannot be
understood through one another--_i.e._ the conception of one does
not involve the conception of the other.

5. To understand an effect implies that we understand the cause of
it.

6. A true idea is one which corresponds with its _ideate_.

7. The essence of anything which can be conceived as non-existent
does not involve existence.

Such is our metaphysical outfit of simple ideas with which to start upon
our enterprise of learning. The larger number of them, so far from being
simple, must be absolutely without meaning to persons whose minds are
undisciplined in metaphysical abstraction; they become only intelligible
propositions as we look back upon them with the light of the system
which they are supposed to contain.

Although, however, we may justly quarrel with such unlooked-for
difficulties, the important question, after all, is not of the obscurity
of these axioms, but of their truth. Many things in all the sciences are
obscure to an unpractised understanding, which are true enough and clear
enough to people acquainted with the subjects, and they may be fairly
made the foundations of a scientific system, although rudimentary
students must be contented to accept them upon faith. Of course, also,
it is entirely competent to Spinoza, or to any one, to define the terms
which he intends to use just as he pleases, provided it be understood
that any conclusions which he derives out of them apply only to the
ideas so defined, and not to any supposed object existing which
corresponds with them. Euclid defines his triangles and circles, and
discovers that to figures so described, certain properties previously
unknown may be proved to belong. But as in nature there are no such
things as triangles and circles exactly answering the definition, his
conclusions, as applied to actually existing objects, are either not
true at all or only proximately so. Whether it be possible to bridge
over the gulf between existing things and the abstract conception of
them, as Spinoza attempts to do, we shall presently see. It is a royal
road to certainty if it be a practicable one; but we cannot say that we
ever met any one who could say honestly Spinoza's reasonings had
convinced him; and power of demonstration, like all other powers, can be
judged only by its effects. Does it prove? does it produce conviction?
If not, it is nothing.

We need not detain our readers among these abstractions. The power of
Spinozism does not lie so remote from ordinary appreciation, or we
should long ago have heard the last of it. Like all other systems which
have attracted followers, it addresses itself, not to the logical
intellect, but to the imagination, which it affects to set aside. We
refuse to submit to the demonstrations by which it thrusts itself upon
our reception; but regarding it as a whole, as an attempt to explain the
nature of the world of which we are a part, we can still ask ourselves
how far the attempt is successful. Some account of these things we know
that there must be, and the curiosity which asks the question regards
itself, of course, as competent in some degree to judge of the answer to
it.

Before proceeding, however, to regard this philosophy in the aspect in
which it is really powerful, we must clear our way through the fallacy
of the method.

The system is evolved in a series of theorems in severely demonstrative
order out of the definitions and axioms which we have translated. To
propositions 1-6 we have nothing to object; they will not, probably,
convey any very clear ideas, but they are so far purely abstract, and
seem to follow (as far as we can speak of 'following' in such subjects)
by fair reasoning. 'Substance is prior in nature to its affections.'
'Substances with different attributes have nothing in common,' and,
therefore, 'one cannot be the cause of the other.' 'Things really
distinct are distinguished by difference either of attribute or mode
(there being nothing else by which they can be distinguished), and,
therefore, because things modally distinguished do not _qua_ substance
differ from one another, there cannot be more than one substance of the
same attribute. Therefore (let us remind our readers that we are among
what Spinoza calls _notiones simplicissimas_), since there cannot be two
substances of the same attribute, and substances of different attributes
cannot be the cause one of the other, it follows that no substance can
be produced by another substance.'

The existence of substance, he then concludes, is involved in the nature
of the thing itself. Substance exists. It does and must. We ask, why?
and we are answered, because there is nothing capable of producing it,
and therefore it is self-caused--_i.e._ by the first definition the
essence of it implies existence as part of the idea. It is astonishing
that Spinoza should not have seen that he assumes the fact that
substance does exist in order to prove that it must. If it cannot be
produced _and_ exists, then, of course, it exists in virtue of its own
nature. But supposing it does not exist, supposing it is all a delusion,
the proof falls to pieces. We have to fall back on the facts of
experience, on the obscure and unscientific certainty that the thing
which we call the world, and the personalities which we call ourselves,
are a real substantial something, before we find ground of any kind to
stand upon. Conscious of the infirmity of his demonstration, Spinoza
winds round it and round it, adding proof to proof, but never escaping
the same vicious circle: substance exists because it exists, and the
ultimate experience of existence, so far from being of that clear kind
which can be accepted as an axiom, is the most confused of all our
sensations. What is existence? and what is that something which we say
exists? Things--essences--existences! these are but the vague names with
which faculties, constructed only to deal with conditional phenomena,
disguise their incapacity. The world in the Hindoo legend was supported
upon the back of the tortoise. It was a step between the world and
nothingness, and served to cheat the imagination with ideas of a
fictitious resting-place.

If any one affirms (says Spinoza) that he has a clear,
distinct--that is to say, a true--idea of substance, but that
nevertheless he is uncertain whether any such substance exist, it is
the same as if he were to affirm that he had a true idea, but yet
was uncertain whether it was not false. Or if he says that
substance can be created, it is like saying that a false idea can
become a true idea--as absurd a thing as it is possible to conceive;
and therefore the existence of substance, as well as the essence of
it, must be acknowledged as an eternal verity.

It is again the same story. Spinoza speaks of a clear idea of substance;
but he has not proved that such an idea is within the compass of the
mind. A man's own notion that he sees clearly, is no proof that he
really sees clearly; and the distinctness of a definition in itself is
no evidence that it corresponds adequately with the object of it. No
doubt a man who professes to have an idea of substance as an existing
thing, cannot doubt, as long as he has it, that substance so exists.
This is merely to say that as long as a man is certain of this or that
fact, he has no doubt of it. But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's
will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot
recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at.

From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of
God. After a few more propositions, following one another with the same
kind of coherence, we arrive successively at the conclusion that there
is but one substance; that this substance being necessarily existent, it
is also infinite; that it is therefore identical with the Being who had
been previously defined as the 'Ens absolute perfectum.'

Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des
Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by
Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza. The
inconclusiveness of the method may perhaps be observed most readily in
the strangely opposite conceptions formed by all these writers of the
nature of that Being whose existence they nevertheless agreed, by the
same process, to gather each out of their ideas. It is important,
however, to examine it carefully, for it is the very keystone of the
Pantheistic system.

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