Short Studies on Great Subjects

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As stated by Des Cartes, the argument stands something as follows:--God
is an all-perfect Being,--perfection is the idea which we form of Him:
existence is a mode of perfection, and therefore God exists. The sophism
we are told is only apparent. Existence is part of the idea--as much
involved in it as the equality of all lines drawn from the centre to the
circumference of a circle is involved in the idea of a circle. A
non-existent all-perfect Being is as inconceivable as a quadrilateral
triangle.

It is sometimes answered that in this way we may prove the existence of
anything--Titans, Chimaeras, or the Olympian Gods; we have but to define
them as existing, and the proof is complete. But, this objection
summarily set aside; none of these beings are by hypothesis absolutely
perfect, and, therefore, of their existence we can conclude nothing.
With greater justice, however, we may say, that of such terms as
perfection and existence we know too little to speculate. Existence may
be an imperfection for all we can tell; we know nothing about the
matter. Such arguments are but endless _petitiones principii_--like the
self-devouring serpent, resolving themselves into nothing. We wander
round and round them, in the hope of finding some tangible point at
which we can seize their meaning; but we are presented everywhere with
the same impracticable surface, from which our grasp glides off
ineffectual.

Spinoza himself, however, obviously felt an intense conviction of the
validity of his argument. His opinion is stated with sufficient
distinctness in one of his letters. 'Nothing is more clear,' he writes
to his pupil De Vries, 'than that, on the one hand, everything which
exists is conceived by or under some attribute or other; that the more
reality, therefore, a being or thing has, the more attributes must be
assigned to it;' 'and conversely' (and this he calls his _argumentum
palmarium_ in proof of the existence of God), '_the more attributes I
assign to a thing, the more I am forced to conceive it as existing_.'
Arrange the argument how we please, we shall never get it into a form
clearer than this:--The more perfect a thing is, the more it must exist
(as if existence could admit of more or less); and therefore the
all-perfect Being must exist absolutely. There is no flaw, we are told,
in the reasoning; and if we are not convinced, it is from the confused
habits of our own minds.

Some persons may think that all arguments are good when on the right
side, and that it is a gratuitous impertinence to quarrel with the
proofs of a conclusion which it is so desirable that all should receive.
As yet, however, we are but inadequately acquainted with the idea
attached by Spinoza to the word perfection; and if we commit ourselves
to his logic, it may lead us out to unexpected consequences. All such
reasonings presume, as a first condition, that we men possess faculties
capable of dealing with absolute ideas; that we can understand the
nature of things external to ourselves as they really _are_ in their
absolute relation to one another, independent of our own conception. The
question immediately before us is one which can never be determined. The
truth which is to be proved is one which we already believe; and if, as
we believe also, our conviction of God's existence is, like that of our
own existence, intuitive and immediate, the grounds of it can never
adequately be analysed; we cannot say exactly what they are, and
therefore we cannot say what they are not. Whatever we receive
intuitively, we receive without proof; and stated as a naked
proposition, it must involve a _petitio principii_. We have a right,
however, to object at once to an argument in which the conclusion is
more obvious than the premises; and if it lead on to other consequences
which we disapprove in themselves, we reject it without difficulty or
hesitation. We ourselves believe that God is, because we experience the
control of a 'power' which is stronger than we; and our instincts teach
us so much of the nature of that power as our own relation to it
requires us to know. God is the being to whom our obedience is due; and
the perfections which we attribute to him are those moral perfections
which are the proper object of our reverence. Strange to say, the
perfections of Spinoza, which appear so clear to him, are without any
moral character whatever; and for men to speak of the justice of God, he
tells us, is but to see in him a reflection of themselves; as if a
triangle were to conceive of him as _eminenter triangularis_, or a
circle to give him the property of circularity.

Having arrived at existence, we next find ourselves among ideas, which
at least are intelligible, if the character of them is as far removed as
before from the circle of ordinary thought. Nothing exists except
substance, the attributes under which substance is expressed, and the
modes or affections of those attributes. There is but one substance
self-existent, eternal, necessary, and that is the absolutely Infinite
all-perfect Being. Substance cannot produce substance, and therefore
there is no such thing as creation; and everything which exists is
either an attribute of God, or an affection of some attribute of him,
modified in this manner or in that. Beyond him there is nothing, and
nothing like him or equal to him; he therefore alone in himself is
absolutely free, uninfluenced by anything, for nothing is except
himself; and from him and from his supreme power, essence, intelligence
(for these words mean the same thing), all things have necessarily
flowed, and will and must flow for ever, in the same manner as from the
nature of a triangle it follows, and has followed, and will follow from
eternity to eternity, that the angles of it are equal to two right
angles. It would seem as if the analogy were but an artificial play upon
words, and that it was only metaphorically that in mathematical
demonstration we speak of one thing as following from another. The
properties of a curve or a triangle are what they are at all times, and
the sequence is merely in the order in which they are successively known
to ourselves. But according to Spinoza, this is the only true sequence;
and what we call the universe, and all the series of incidents in earth
or planet, are involved formally and mathematically in the definition of
God.

Each attribute is infinite _suo genere_; and it is time that we should
know distinctly the meaning which Spinoza attaches to that important
word. Out of the infinite number of the attributes of God, two only, he
says, are known to us--'extension,' and 'thought,' or 'mind.' Duration,
even though it be without beginning or end, is not an attribute; it is
not even a real thing. Time has no relation to Being, conceived
mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as
any older to-day than they were at the beginning of the world. These and
everything of the same kind are conceived, as Spinoza rightly says, _sub
quadam specie aeternitatis_. But extension, or substance extended, and
thought, or substance perceiving, are real, absolute, and objective. We
must not confound extension with body; for though body be a mode of
extension, there is extension which is not body, and it is infinite
because we cannot conceive it to be limited except by itself--or, in
other words, to be limited at all. And as it is with extension, so it is
with mind, which is also infinite with the infinity of its object. Thus
there is no such thing as creation, and no beginning or end. All things
of which our faculties are cognizant under one or other of these
attributes are produced from God, and in him they have their being, and
without him they would cease to be.

Proceeding by steps of rigid demonstration (and most admirably indeed is
the form of the philosophy adapted to the spirit of it), we learn that
God is the only _causa libera_; that no other thing or being has any
power of self-determination; all moves by fixed laws of causation,
motive upon motive, act upon act; there is no free will, and no
contingency; and however necessary it may be for our incapacity to
consider future things as in a sense contingent (see _Tractat. Theol.
Polit._ cap. iv., sec. 4), this is but one of the thousand convenient
deceptions which we are obliged to employ with ourselves. God is the
_causa immanens omnium_; he is not a personal being existing apart from
the universe; but himself in his own reality, he is expressed in the
universe, which is his living garment. Keeping to the philosophical
language of the time, Spinoza preserves the distinction between _natura
naturans_ and _natura naturata_. The first is being in itself, the
attributes of substance as they are conceived simply and alone; the
second is the infinite series of modifications which follow out of the
properties of these attributes. And thus all which _is_, is what it is
by an absolute necessity, and could not have been other than it is. God
is free, because no causes external to himself have power over him; and
as good men are most free when most a law to themselves, so it is no
infringement on God's freedom to say that he _must_ have acted as he has
acted, but rather he is absolutely free because absolutely a law himself
to himself.

Here ends the first book of Spinoza's Ethics--the book which contains,
as we said, the _notiones simplicissimas_, and the primary and
rudimental deductions from them. _His Dei naturam_, he says, in his
lofty confidence, _ejusque proprietates explicui_. But, as if conscious
that his method will never convince, he concludes this portion of his
subject with an analytical appendix; not to explain or apologise, but to
show us clearly, in practical detail, the position into which he has led
us. The root, we are told, of all philosophical errors lies in our
notion of final causes; we invert the order of nature, and interpret
God's action through our own; we speak of his intentions, as if he were
a man; we assume that we are capable of measuring them, and finally
erect ourselves, and our own interests, into the centre and criterion of
all things. Hence arises our notion of evil. If the universe be what
this philosophy has described it, the perfection which it assigns to
God is extended to everything, and evil is of course impossible; there
is no shortcoming either in nature or in man; each person and each thing
is exactly what it has the power to be, and nothing more. But men
imagining that all things exist on their account, and perceiving their
own interests, bodily and spiritual, capable of being variously
affected, have conceived these opposite influences to result from
opposite and contradictory powers, and call what contributes to their
advantage good, and whatever obstructs it, evil. For our convenience we
form generic conceptions of human excellence, as archetypes after which
to strive; and such of us as approach nearest to such archetypes are
supposed to be virtuous, and those who are most remote from them to be
wicked. But such generic abstractions are but _entia imaginationis_, and
have no real existence. In the eyes of God each thing is what it has the
means of being. There is no rebellion against him, and no resistance of
his will; in truth, therefore, there neither is nor can be such a thing
as a bad action in the common sense of the word. Actions are good or
bad, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent;
what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as
soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free
volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.

If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were not
created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was
because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all
things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to
speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were ample
enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be
conceived by an Infinite Intelligence.

It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn
away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful,
perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in
language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must
claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for
himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think
ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines if they were
generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are worked into
maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound
to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must
be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may
disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that
of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist. The
fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of
all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational,
setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections,
with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with
William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once with how little justice
the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to
denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions
between virtue and vice.

We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged
something of the kind), we speak of this or that man having done a
wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of
humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such
abstract manner, nor forms to himself such generic definitions, and
since there is no more reality in anything than God has assigned to
it, it follows, surely, that the absence of good exists only in
respect of man's understanding, not in respect of God's.

If this be so, then (replies Blyenburg), bad men fulfil God's will
as well as good.

It is true (Spinoza answers) they fulfil it, yet not as the good nor
as well as the good, nor are they to be compared with them. The
better a thing or a person be, the more there is in him of God's
spirit, and the more he expresses God's will; while the bad, being
without that divine love which arises from the knowledge of God, and
through which alone we are called (in respect of our understandings)
his servants, are but as instruments in the hand of the
artificer--they serve unconsciously, and are consumed in their
service.

Spinoza, after all, is but stating in philosophical language the extreme
doctrine of Grace; and St. Paul, if we interpret his real belief by the
one passage so often quoted, in which he compares us to 'clay in the
hands of the potter, who maketh one vessel to honour and another to
dishonour,' may be accused with justice of having held the same opinion.
If Calvinism be pressed to its logical consequences, it either becomes
an intolerable falsehood, or it resolves itself into the philosophy of
Spinoza. It is monstrous to call evil a positive thing, and to assert,
in the same breath, that God has predetermined it,--to tell us that he
has ordained what he hates, and hates what he has ordained. It is
incredible that we should be without power to obey him except through
his free grace, and yet be held responsible for our failures when that
grace has been withheld. And it is idle to call a philosopher
sacrilegious who has but systematised the faith which so many believe,
and cleared it of its most hideous features.

Spinoza flinches from nothing, and disguises no conclusions either from
himself or from his readers. We believe for ourselves that logic has no
business with such questions; that the answer to them lies in the
conscience and not in the intellect. Spinoza thinks otherwise; and he is
at least true to the guide which he has chosen. Blyenburg presses him
with instances of monstrous crime, such as bring home to the heart the
natural horror of it. He speaks of Nero's murder of Agrippina, and asks
if God can be called the cause of such an act as that.

God (replies Spinoza, calmly) is the cause of all things which have
reality. If you can show that evil, errors, crimes express any real
things, I agree readily that God is the cause of them; but I
conceive myself to have proved that what constitutes the essence of
evil is not a real thing at all, and therefore that God cannot be
the cause of it. Nero's matricide was not a crime, in so far as it
was a positive outward act. Orestes also killed his mother; and we
do not judge Orestes as we judge Nero. The crime of the latter lay
in his being without pity, without obedience, without natural
affection--none of which things express any positive essence, but
the absence of it; and therefore God was not the cause of these,
although he was the cause of the act and the intention.

But once for all (he adds), this aspect of things will remain
intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free
will remain unremoved.

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as
false as Spinoza supposes them--if we have no power to be anything but
what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and
what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God,
they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have
willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or
cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an
infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than
none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and
the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has
made all things for himself, even the wicked for the day of evil.'

The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed. We
pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which
is best disposed of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it
is, or whether properly it _is_ anything), the words past, present,
future, do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them: things will
be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now, if
everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the
nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be
any time but the present, or how past and future have room for a
meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him _are_, just as
every property of a circle exists in it as soon as the circle exists. We
may if we like, for convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and
say, _e.g._ that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle
under the parts of the one _will_ equal that under the parts of the
other. But we only mean in reality that these rectangles _are_ equal;
and the _future_ relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing,
however, as much as we please, that the condition of England a hundred
years hence lies already in embryo in existing causes, it is a paradox
to say that such condition exists already in the sense in which the
properties of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on the
illustration.

It is singular that he should not have noticed the difficulty; not that
either it or the answer to it (which no doubt would have been ready
enough) are likely to interest any person except metaphysicians, a class
of thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.

We proceed to more important matters--to Spinoza's detailed theory of
nature as exhibited in man and in man's mind. His theory for its bold
ingenuity is by far the most remarkable which on this dark subject has
ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or not, is another
question; yet undoubtedly it provides a solution for every difficulty;
it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of
spiritualism: and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy
that it will explain phenomena and reconcile contradictions, it is hard
to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so
admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is.

Most people have heard of the 'Harmonie Pre-etablie' of Leibnitz; it is
borrowed without acknowledgment from Spinoza, and adapted to the
Leibnitzian philosophy. 'Man,' says Leibnitz, 'is composed of mind and
body; but what is mind and what is body, and what is the nature of their
union? Substances so opposite in kind cannot affect one another; mind
cannot act on matter, or matter upon mind; and the appearance of their
reciprocal operation is an appearance only and a delusion.' A delusion
so general, however, required to be accounted for; and Leibnitz
accounted for it by supposing that God, in creating a world composed of
material and spiritual phenomena, ordained that these several phenomena
should proceed from the beginning in parallel lines side by side in a
constantly corresponding harmony. The sense of seeing results, it
appears to us, from the formation of a picture upon the retina. The
motion of the arm or the leg appears to result from an act of will; but
in either case we mistake coincidence for causation. Between substances
so wholly alien there can be no intercommunion; and we only suppose that
the object seen produces the idea, and that the desire produces the
movement, because the phenomena of matter and the phenomena of spirit
are so contrived as to flow always in the same order and sequence. This
hypothesis, as coming from Leibnitz, has been, if not accepted, at least
listened to respectfully; because while taking it out of its proper
place, he contrived to graft it upon Christianity; and succeeded, with a
sort of speculative legerdemain, in making it appear to be in harmony
with revealed religion. Disguised as a philosophy of Predestination, and
connected with the Christian doctrine of Retribution, it steps forward
with an air of unconscious innocence, as if interfering with nothing
which Christians generally believe. And yet, leaving as it does no
larger scope for liberty or responsibility than when in the hands of
Spinoza,[O] Leibnitz, in our opinion, has only succeeded in making it
infinitely more revolting. Spinoza could not regard the bad man as an
object of Divine anger and a subject of retributory punishment. He was
not a Christian, and made no pretension to be considered such; and it
did not occur to him to regard the actions of a being which, both with
Leibnitz and himself, is (to use his own expression) an _automaton
spirituale_, as deserving a fiery indignation and everlasting vengeance.

'Deus,' according to Spinoza's definition, 'est ens constans infinitis
attributis quorum unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit.'
Under each of these attributes _infinita sequuntur_, and everything
which an infinite intelligence can conceive, and an infinite power can
produce,--everything which follows as a possibility out of the divine
nature,--all things which have been, and are, and will be,--find
expression and actual existence, not under one attribute only, but under
each and every attribute. Language is so ill adapted to explain such a
system, that even to state it accurately is all but impossible, and
analogies can only remotely suggest what such expressions mean. But it
is as if it were said that the same thought might be expressed in an
infinite variety of languages; and not in words only, but in action, in
painting, in sculpture, in music, in any form of any kind which can be
employed as a means of spiritual embodiment. Of all these infinite
attributes, two only, as we said, are known to us--extension and
thought. Material phenomena are phenomena of extension; and to every
modification of extension an idea corresponds under the attribute of
thought. Out of such a compound as this is formed man, composed of body
and mind; two parallel and correspondent modifications eternally
answering one another. And not man only, but all other beings and things
are similarly formed and similarly animated; the anima or mind of each
varying according to the complicity of the organism of its material
counterpart. Although body does not think, nor affect the mind's power
of thinking, and mind does not control body, nor communicate to it
either motion or rest or any influence from itself, yet body with all
its properties is the object or ideate of mind: whatsoever body does,
mind perceives; and the greater the energising power of the first, the
greater the perceiving power of the second. And this is not because they
are adapted one to the other by some inconceivable preordinating power,
but because mind and body are _una et eadem res_, the one absolute being
affected in one and the same manner, but expressed under several
attributes; the modes and affections of each attribute having that being
for their cause, as he exists under that attribute of which they are
modes, and no other; idea being caused by idea, and body affected by
body; the image on the retina being produced by the object reflected
upon it, the idea or image in our minds by the idea of that object, &c.
&c.

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