Short Studies on Great Subjects

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

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A solution so remote from all ordinary ways of thinking on these matters
is so difficult to grasp, that one can hardly speak of it as being
probable, or as being improbable. Probability extends only to what we
can imagine as possible, and Spinoza's theory seems to lie beyond the
range within which our judgment can exercise itself. In our own opinion,
indeed, as we have already said, the entire subject is one with which we
have no business; and the explanation of our nature, if it is ever to be
explained to us, is reserved till we are in some other state of
existence. We do not disbelieve Spinoza because what he suggests is in
itself incredible. The chances may be millions to one against his being
right; yet the real truth, if we knew it, would be probably at least as
strange as his conception of it. But we are firmly convinced that of
these questions, and of all like them, practical answers only lie
within the reach of human faculties; and that in 'researches into the
absolute' we are on the road which ends nowhere.

Among the difficulties, however, most properly akin to this philosophy
itself, there is one most obvious, viz., that if the attributes of God
be infinite, and each particular thing is expressed under them all, then
mind and body express but an infinitesimal portion of the nature of each
of ourselves; and this human nature exists (_i.e._, there exists
corresponding modes of substance) in the whole infinity of the divine
nature under attributes differing each from each, and all from mind and
all from body. That this must be so follows from the definition of the
Infinite Being, and the nature of the distinction between the two
attributes which are known to us; and if this be so, why does not the
mind perceive something of all these other attributes? The objection is
well expressed by a correspondent (Letter 67):--'It follows from what
you say,' a friend writes to Spinoza, 'that the modification which
constitutes my mind, and that which constitutes my body, although it be
one and the same modification, yet must be expressed in an infinity of
ways: one way by thought, a second way by extension, a third by some
attribute unknown to me, and so on to infinity; the attributes being
infinite in number, and the order and connexion of modes being the same
in them all. Why, then, does the mind perceive the modes of but one
attribute only?'

Spinoza's answer is curious: unhappily, a fragment of his letter only is
extant, so that it is too brief to be satisfactory:--

In reply to your difficulty (he says), although each particular
thing be truly in the Infinite mind, conceived in Infinite modes,
the Infinite idea answering to all these cannot constitute one and
the same mind of any single being, but must constitute Infinite
minds. No one of all these Infinite ideas has any connexion with
another.

He means, we suppose, that God's mind only perceives, or can perceive,
things under their Infinite expression, and that the idea of each
several mode, under whatever attribute, constitutes a separate mind.

We do not know that we can add anything to this explanation; the
difficulty lies in the audacious sweep of the speculation itself; we
will, however, attempt an illustration, although we fear it will be to
illustrate _obscurum per obscurius_. Let A B C D be four out of the
Infinite number of the Divine attributes. A the attribute of mind; B the
attribute of extension; C and D other attributes, the nature of which is
not known to us. Now, A, as the attribute of mind, is that which
perceives all which takes place under B C and D, but it is only as it
exists in God that it forms the universal consciousness of all
attributes at once. In its modifications it is combined separately with
the modifications of each, constituting in combination with the modes of
each attribute a separate being. As forming the mind of B, A perceives
what takes place in B, but not what takes place in C or D. Combined with
B, it forms the soul of the human body, and generally the soul of all
modifications of extended substance; combined with C, it forms the soul
of some other analogous being; combined with D, again of another; but
the combinations are only in pairs, in which A is constant. A and B make
one being, A and C another, A and D a third; but B will not combine with
C, nor C with D; each attribute being, as it were, conscious only of
itself. And therefore, although to those modifications of mind and
extension which we call ourselves, there are corresponding modifications
under C and D, and generally under each of the Infinite attributes of
God, each of ourselves being in a sense Infinite--nevertheless, we
neither have nor can have any knowledge of ourselves in this Infinite
aspect; our actual consciousness being limited to the phenomena of
sensible experience.

English readers, however, are likely to care little for all this; they
will look to the general theory, and judge of it as its aspect affects
them. And first, perhaps, they will be tempted to throw aside as absurd
the notion that their bodies go through the many operations which they
experience them to do, undirected by their minds. It is a thing, they
may say, at once preposterous and incredible. It is, however, less
absurd than it seems; and, though we could not persuade ourselves to
believe it, absurd in the sense of having nothing to be said for it, it
certainly is not. It is far easier, for instance, to imagine the human
body capable by its own virtue, and by the laws of material
organisation, of building a house, than of _thinking_; and yet men are
allowed to say that the body thinks, without being regarded as
candidates for a lunatic asylum. We see the seed shoot up into stem and
leaf and throw out flowers; we observe it fulfilling processes of
chemistry more subtle than were ever executed in Liebig's laboratory,
and producing structures more cunning than man can imitate. The bird
builds her nest, the spider shapes out its delicate web, and stretches
it in the path of his prey; directed not by calculating thought, as we
conceive ourselves to be, but by some motive influence, our ignorance of
the nature of which we disguise from ourselves, and call it instinct,
but which we believe at least to be some property residing in the
organisation. We are not to suppose that the human body, the most
complex of all material structures, has slighter powers in it than the
bodies of a seed, a bird, or an insect. Let us listen to Spinoza
himself:--

There can be no doubt (he says) that this hypothesis is true; but
unless I can prove it from experience, men will not, I fear, be
induced even to reflect upon it calmly, so persuaded are they that
it is by the mind only that their bodies are set in motion. And yet
what body can or cannot do no one has yet determined; body, _i.e._,
by the law of its own nature, and without assistance from mind. No
one has so probed the human frame as to have detected all its
functions and exhausted the list of them; there are powers exhibited
by animals far exceeding human sagacity; and, again, feats are
performed by somnambulists on which in the waking state the same
persons would never venture--itself a proof that body is able to
accomplish what mind can only admire. Men _say_ that mind moves
body, but how it moves it they cannot tell, or what degree of motion
it can impart to it; so that, in fact, they do not know what they
say, and are only confessing their own ignorance in specious
language. They will answer me, that whether or not they understand
how it can be, yet that they are assured by plain experience that
unless mind could perceive, body would be altogether inactive; they
know that it depends on the mind whether the tongue speaks or is
silent. But do they not equally experience that if their bodies are
paralysed their minds cannot think?--that if their bodies are asleep
their minds are without power?--that their minds are not at all
times equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but
depend on the state of their bodies? And as for experience proving
that the members of the body can be controlled by the mind, I fear
experience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd (they
rejoin) to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such things
as pictures, or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, that we do
not yet know what body can or cannot do, or what would naturally
follow from the structure of it; that we experience in the feats of
somnambulists something which antecedently to that experience would
have seemed incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds
infinitely any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it.

We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although if the matter
were one the debating of which could be of any profit, it would
undoubtedly have its weight, and would require to be patiently
considered. Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and in which we are
trifling with what is inscrutable.

Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself,
when he went on to gather out of his philosophy 'that the mind of man
being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind
perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives
it, not as he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of
this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or
that action, we say that God does it, not _qua_ he is Infinite, but
_qua_ he is expressed in that man's nature.' 'Here,' he says, 'many
readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them
in the way of such a supposition.'

We confess that we ourselves are among these hesitating readers. As long
as the Being whom Spinoza so freely names remains surrounded with the
associations which in this country we bring with us out of our
childhood, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to
language such as this. It is not so--we know it, and that is enough. We
are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our
theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion depended on
speculative consistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and
terrify us. What are we? what _is_ anything? If it be not divine--what
is it then? If created--out of what is it created? and how created--and
why? These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not
enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any
the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently
provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not
care to have them answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to
which we choose to be referred, and conscience declares imperatively
that what he says is not true. It is painful to speak of all this, and
as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but
the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from
one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we
are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was
_nothing else_ but that world which we experience. It is but one of
infinite expressions of him--a conception which makes us giddy in the
effort to realise it.

We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its
bearings upon life and human duty. It was in the search after this last,
that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we
now expect his conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct
his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting
felicity, and, by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to
them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these
objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them--is the
aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy. 'Most people,' he adds, 'deride
or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand
it; and however extravagant my proceeding may be thought, I propose to
analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical
figure.' Mind being, as he conceives himself to have shown, nothing else
than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body, we are
not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an
act. There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is
any general abstract volition, but only _hic et ille intellectus et haec
et illa volitio_.

Again, by the word Mind is understood not merely an act or acts of will
or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of sensation or
emotion. The human body being composed of many small bodies, the mind is
similarly composed of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind
depends on the relation which the component portions maintain towards
each other. This is obviously the case with body; and if we can
translate metaphysics into common experience, it is equally the case
with mind. There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect; a
thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our mental
composition; and since one contradicts another, and each has a tendency
to become dominant, it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their
several activities, in their due and just subordination, that any unity
of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After a masterly
analysis of all these tendencies (the most complete by far which has
ever been made by any moral philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the
principles under which unity and consistency can be obtained as the
condition upon which a being so composed can look for any sort of
happiness; and these principles, arrived at as they are by a route so
different, are the same, and are proposed by Spinoza as being the same,
as those of the Christian religion.

It might seem impossible in a system which binds together in so
inexorable a sequence the relations of cause and effect, to make a place
for the action of self-control; but consideration will show that,
however vast the difference between those who deny and those who affirm
the liberty of the will (in the sense in which the expression is usually
understood), it is not a difference which affects the conduct or alters
the practical bearings of it. Conduct may be determined by laws--laws as
absolute as those of matter; and yet the one as well as the other may be
brought under control by a proper understanding of those laws. Now,
experience seems plainly to say, that while all our actions arise out of
desire--that whatever we do, we do for the sake of something which we
wish to be or to obtain--we are differently affected towards what is
proposed to us as an object of desire, in proportion as we understand
the nature of such object in itself and in its consequences. The better
we know, the better we act; and the fallacy of all common arguments
against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room
for self-direction: it merely insists, in exact conformity with
experience, on the conditions under which self-determination is
possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.
Let a man certainly know that there is poison in the cup of wine before
him, and he will not drink it. By the law of cause and effect, his
desire for the wine is overcome by the fear of the pain or the death
which will follow. So with everything which comes before him. Let the
consequences of any action be clear, definite, and inevitable, and
though Spinoza would not say that the knowledge of them will be
absolutely sufficient to determine the conduct (because the clearest
knowledge may be overborne by violent passion), yet it is the best
which we have to trust to, and will do much if it cannot do all.

On this hypothesis, after a diagnosis of the various tendencies of human
nature, called commonly the passions and affections, he returns upon the
nature of our ordinary knowledge to derive out of it the means for their
subordination. All these tendencies of themselves seek their own
objects--seek them blindly and immoderately; and the mistakes and the
unhappinesses of life arise from the want of due understanding of these
objects, and a just moderation of the desire for them. His analysis is
remarkably clear, but it is too long for us to enter upon it; the
important thing being the character of the control which is to be
exerted. To arrive at this, he employs a distinction of great practical
utility, and which is peculiarly his own.

Following his tripartite division of knowledge, he finds all kinds of it
arrange themselves under one of two classes, and to be either adequate
or inadequate. By adequate knowledge he does not mean what is exhaustive
and complete, but what, as far as it goes, is distinct and unconfused:
by inadequate, he means what we know merely as fact either derived from
our own sensations, or from the authority of others, while of the
connexion of it with other facts, of the causes, effects, or meaning of
it we know nothing. We may have an adequate idea of a circle, though we
are unacquainted with all the properties which belong to it; we conceive
it distinctly as a figure generated by the rotation of a line, one end
of which is stationary. Phenomena, on the other hand, however made known
to us--phenomena of the senses, and phenomena of experience, as long as
they remain phenomena merely, and unseen in any higher relation--we can
never know except as inadequately. We cannot tell what outward things
are by coming in contact with certain features of them. We have a very
imperfect acquaintance even with our own bodies, and the sensations
which we experience of various kinds rather indicate to us the nature of
these bodies themselves than of the objects which affect them. Now, it
is obvious that the greater part of mankind act only upon knowledge of
this latter kind. The amusements, even the active pursuits, of most of
us remain wholly within the range of uncertainty, and, therefore, are
full of hazard and precariousness: little or nothing issues as we
expect. We look for pleasure and we find pain; we shun one pain and
find a greater; and thus arises the ineffectual character which we so
complain of in life--the disappointments, failures, mortifications which
form the material of so much moral meditation on the vanity of the
world. Much of all this is inevitable from the constitution of our
nature. The mind is too infirm to be entirely occupied with higher
knowledge. The conditions of life oblige us to act in many cases which
cannot be understood by us except with the utmost inadequacy; and the
resignation to the higher will which has determined all things in the
wisest way, is imperfect in the best of us. Yet much is possible, if not
all; and, although through a large tract of life 'there comes one event
to all, to the wise and to the unwise,' 'yet wisdom excelleth folly as
far as light excelleth darkness.' The phenomena of experience, after
inductive experiment, and just and careful consideration, arrange
themselves under laws uniform in their operation, and furnishing a guide
to the judgment; and over all things, although the interval must remain
unexplored for ever, because what we would search into is Infinite, may
be seen the beginning of all things, the absolute eternal God. 'Mens
humana,' Spinoza continues, 'quaedam agit, quaedam vero patitur.' In so
far as it is influenced by inadequate ideas--'eatenus patitur'--it is
passive and in bondage, it is the sport of fortune and caprice: in so
far as its ideas are adequate--'eatenus agit'--it is active, it is
itself. While we are governed by outward temptations, by the casual
pleasures, by the fortunes or the misfortunes of life, we are but
instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted
on by its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which bind it;
we are slaves--instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the
order of nature, but in ourselves nothing; instruments which are
employed for a special work, and which are consumed in effecting it. So
far, on the contrary, as we know clearly what we do, as we understand
what we are, and direct our conduct not by the passing emotion of the
moment, but by a grave, clear, and constant knowledge of what is really
good, so far we are said to act--we are ourselves the spring of our own
activity--we pursue the genuine well-being of our entire nature, and
_that_ we can always find, and it never disappoints us when found.

All things desire life; all things seek for energy, and fuller and
ampler being. The component parts of man, his various appetites and
passions, are seeking larger activity while pursuing each its immoderate
indulgence; and it is the primary law of every single being that it so
follows what will give it increased vitality. Whatever will contribute
to such increase is the proper good of each; and the good of man as a
united being is measured and determined by the effect of it upon his
collective powers. The appetites gather power from their several objects
of desire; but the power of the part is the weakness of the whole; and
man as a collective person gathers life, being, and self-mastery only
from the absolute good,--the source of all real good, and truth, and
energy,--that is, God. The love of God is the extinction of all other
loves and all other desires. To know God, as far as man can know him, is
power, self-government, and peace. And this is virtue, and this is
blessedness.

Thus, by a formal process of demonstration, we are brought round to the
old conclusions of theology; and Spinoza protests that it is no new
doctrine which he is teaching, but that it is one which in various
dialects has been believed from the beginning of the world. Happiness
depends on the consistency and coherency of character, and that
coherency can only be given by the knowledge of the One Being, to know
whom is to know all things adequately, and to love whom is to have
conquered every other inclination. The more entirely our minds rest on
him--the more distinctly we regard all things in their relation to him,
the more we cease to be under the dominion of external things; we
surrender ourselves consciously to do his will, and as living men and
not as passive things we become the instruments of his power. When the
true nature and true causes of our affections become clear to us, they
have no more power to influence us. The more we understand, the less can
feeling sway us; we know that all things are what they are, because they
are so constituted that they could not be otherwise, and we cease to be
angry with our brother, because he disappoints us; we shall not fret at
calamity, nor complain of fortune, because no such thing as fortune
exists; and if we fail it is better than if we had succeeded, not
perhaps for ourselves, yet for the universe. We cannot fear, when
nothing can befall us except what God wills, and we shall not violently
hope, when the future, whatever it be, will be the best which is
possible. Seeing all things in their place in the everlasting order,
Past and Future will not affect us. The temptation of present pleasure
will not overcome the certainty of future pain, for the pain will be as
sure as the pleasure, and we shall see all things under a rule of
adamant. The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of
contingency, and expect to escape the just issues of their actions; the
wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable
consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be
himself.

In such a manner, through all the conditions of life, Spinoza pursues
the advantages which will accrue to man from the knowledge of God, God
and man being what his philosophy has described them. His practical
teaching is singularly beautiful; although much of its beauty is perhaps
due to associations which have arisen out of Christianity, and which in
the system of Pantheism have no proper abiding place. Retaining, indeed,
all that is beautiful in Christianity, he even seems to have relieved
himself of the more fearful features of the general creed. He
acknowledges no hell, no devil, no positive and active agency at enmity
with God; but sees in all things infinite gradations of beings, all in
their way obedient, and all fulfilling the part allotted to them.
Doubtless a pleasant exchange and a grateful deliverance, if only we
could persuade ourselves that a hundred pages of judiciously arranged
demonstrations could really and indeed have worked it for us; if we
could indeed believe that we could have the year without its winter, day
without night, sunlight without shadow. Evil is unhappily too real a
thing to be so disposed of.

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