Part 25

While, however, Spinoza thus escapes some of the inconsequences of Descartes, the contradiction that was _implicit_ in the Cartesian system between the duality and the unity, the attributes and the substance, in his system becomes _explicit_. When so great emphasis is laid upon the unity of substance, it becomes more difficult to explain the difference of the attributes. The result is, that Spinoza is forced to account for it, not by the nature of substance itself, but by the nature of the intelligence to which it is revealed. "By substance," he says, "I understand that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself. By attribute I understand the same thing, nisi quod attributum dicatur respectu inteltectus substantiae certum talem naturam tribuentis."[43] Hence we are naturally led with J.E. Erdmann to think of the intelligence dividing the substance as a kind of prism that breaks the white light into different colours, through each of which the same world is seen, only with a different aspect. But if the intelligence in itself is but a mode of one of the attributes, how can it be itself the source of their distinction?

The key to this difficulty is that Spinoza has really, and almost in spite of his logical principles, two opposite conceptions of substance, between which he alternates without ever bringing them to a unity. On the one hand, in accordance with the principle that determination is negation, substance must be taken as that which is utterly indeterminate, like the Absolute of the Buddhist, which we can characterize only by denying of it everything that we assert of the finite. In this view, no predicate can be applied univocally to God and to the creatures; he differs from them, not only in existence, but in essence.[44] If we follow out this view to its legitimate result, God is withdrawn into his own absolute unity, and no difference of attributes can be ascribed to him, except in respect of something else than himself. It is owing to the defects of out intelligence that he appears under different forms or expressions; in himself he is pure being, without form or expression at all. But, on the other hand, it is to be observed, that while Spinoza really proceeds by abstraction and negation, he does not _mean_ to do so. The abstract is to him the unreal and imaginary, and what he means by substance is not simply Being in general, the conception that remains when we omit all that distinguishes the particulars, but the absolute totality of things conceived as a unity in which all particular existence is included and subordinated. Hence at a single stroke the indeterminate passes into the most determinate Being, the Being with no attributes at all into the Being constituted by an infinite number of attributes. And while, under the former conception, the defect of our intelligence seemed to be that it divided the substance, or saw a difference of attributes in its absolute unity, under the second conception its defect lies in its apprehending only two out of the infinite multitude of these attributes.

To do justice to Spinoza, therefore, we must distinguish between the actual effect of his logic and its effect as he conceived it. The actual effect of his logic is to dissolve all in the ultimate abstraction of Being, from which we can find no way back to the concrete. But his intent was simply to relate all the parts to that absolute unity which is the presupposition of all thought and being, and so to arrive at the most concrete and complete idea of the reality of things. He failed to see what is involved in his own principle that determination is negation; for if affirmation is impossible without negation, then the attempt to divorce the two from each other, the attempt to find a purely affirmative being, must necessarily end in the barest of all abstractions being confused with the unity of all things. But even when the infinite substance is defined as the negative of the finite, the idea of the finite becomes an essential element in the conception of the infinite. Even the Pantheist, who says that God is what finite things are not, in spite of himself recognizes that God has a relation to finite things. Finite things may in his eyes have no positive relation to God, yet they have a negative relation; it is through their evanescence and transitoriness, through their nothingness, that the eternal, the infinite reality alone is revealed to him. Spinoza is quite conscious of this process, conscious that he reaches the affirmation of substance by a negation of what he conceives as the purely negative and unreal existence of finite things, but as he regards the assertion of the finite as merely an illusion due to _our_ imagination, so he regards the correction of this illusion, the negation of the finite as a movement of reflection which belongs merely to our intelligence, and has nothing to do with the nature of substance in itself. We find the true affirmation by the negation of the negative, but in itself affirmation has no relation to negation. Hence his absolute being is the dead all-absorbing substance and not the self-revealing spirit. It is the being without determination, and not the being that determines itself. There is no reason in the nature of substance why it should have either attributes or modes; neither individual finite things nor the general distinction of mind and matter can be deduced from it. The descending movement of thought is not what Spinoza himself said it should be, an evolution, but simply an external and empirical process by which the elements dropped in the ascending movement of abstraction are taken up again with a merely nominal change. For the sole difference in the conception of mind and matter as well as in the conception of individual minds and bodies which is made by their reference to the idea of God, is that they lose their substantive character and become adjectives. Aristotle objected to Plato that his ideas were merely [Greek: aistheta aidia], that is, that his idealization of the world was merely superficial, and left the things idealized very much what they were before to the sensuous consciousness; and the same may be said of Spinoza's negation of finite things. It was an external and imperfect negation, which did not transform the idea of the finite, but merely substituted the names of attributes and modes for the names of general and individual substances.

The same defective logic, by which the movement of thought in determining the substance is regarded as altogether external to the substance itself, is seen again in Spinoza's conceptions of the relations of the attributes to each other. Adopting the Cartesian opposition of mind and matter, he does not see, any more than Descartes, that in their opposition they are correlative. Or if he did see it (as seems possible from a passage in his earliest treatise),[45] he regarded the correlation as merely subjective, merely belonging to our thought. They are to him only the two attributes which we happen to know out of the infinite number belonging to God. There is no necessity that the substance should manifest itself in just these attributes and no others, for abstract substance is equally receptive of all determinations, and equally indifferent to them all. Just because the unity is merely generic, the differences are accidental, and do not form by their union any complete whole. If Spinoza had seen that matter in itself is the correlative opposite of mind in itself, he need not have sought by abstracting from the difference of these elements to reach a unity which is manifested in that very difference, and his absolute would have been not substance but spirit. This idea he never reached, but we find him approximating to it in two ways. On the one hand, he condemns the Cartesian conception of matter as passive and self-external, or infinitely divisible--as, in short, the mere opposite of thought.[46] And sometimes he insists on the parallelism of extension and thought at the expense of their opposition in a way that almost anticipates the assertion by Leibnitz of the essential identity of mind and matter. On the other hand, he recognizes that this parallelism is not complete. Thought is not like a picture; it is conscious, and conscious not only of itself, but of extension. It transcends therefore the absolute distinction between itself and other attributes. It is only because he cannot rid himself of the phantom of an extended matter as a thing in itself, which is entirely different from the idea of it, that Spinoza is prevented from recognising in mind that unity that transcends all distinctions, even its own distinction from matter. As it is, his main reason for saying that intelligence is not an attribute of God, but merely a mode, seems to be this, that the thought of God must be conceived as producing its own object, i.e. as transcending the distinction of subject and object which is necessary to our intelligence.[47] But this argument of itself points to a concrete quite as much as to an abstract unity. It is as consistent with the idea of absolute spirit as with that of absolute substance. Spinoza's deliberate and formal doctrine is undoubtedly the latter; but he constantly employs expressions which imply the former, as when he speaks of God as _causa sui_. The higher idea inspires him, though his consciousness only embraces the lower idea.

Spinoza's ethical system.

The ethical philosophy of Spinoza is determined by the same principles and embarrassed by the same difficulties as his metaphysics. In it also we find the same imperfect conception of the relation of the positive to the negative elements, and, as a consequence, the same confusion of the highest unity of thought, the affirmation that subordinates and transcends all negation with mere abstract affirmation. Or, to put the same thing in ethical language, Spinoza teaches a morality which is in every point the opposite of asceticism, a morality of self-assertion or self-seeking, and not of self-denial. The _conatus sese conservandi_ is to him the supreme principle of virtue;[48] yet this self-seeking is supposed, under the guidance of reason, to identify itself with the love of man and the love of God, and to find blessedness not in the reward of virtue, but in virtue itself. It is only confusion of thought and false mysticism that could object to this result on the ground of the element of self still preserved in the _amor Dei intellectualis_. For it is just the power of identifyihg himself with that which is wider and higher than his individual being that makes morality possible to man. But the difficulty lies in this, that Spinoza will not admit the negative element, the element of mortification or sacrifice, into morality at all, even as a moment of transition. For him there is no dead self, by which we may rise to higher things, no losing of life that we may find it. For the negative is nothing, it is evil in the only sense in which evil exists, and cannot be the source of good. The higher affirmation of our own being, the higher seeking of ourselves which is identical with the love of God, must therefore be regarded as nothing distinct in kind from that first seeking of our natural self which in Spinoza's view belongs to us in common with the animals, and indeed in common with all beings whatever. It must be regarded merely as a direct development and extension of the same thing. The main interest of the Spinozistic ethics therefore lies in observing by what steps he accomplishes this transition, while excluding altogether the idea of a real division of the higher and the lower life, the spirit and flesh, and of a conflict in which the former is developed through the sacrifice of the latter.

Finite creatures exist only as modes of the divine substance, only so far as they partake in the infinite, or what is the same thing with Spinoza, in the purely affirmative or self-affirming nature of God. They therefore must also be self-affirming. They can never limit themselves; their limit lies in this, that they are not identified with the infinite substance which expresses itself also in other modes. In other words, the limit of any finite creature, that which makes it finite, lies without it, and its own existence, so far as it goes, must be pure self-assertion and self-seeking. "Unaquaeque res quantum in se est in suo esse perseverare conatur," and this _conatus_ is its very essence or inmost nature.[49] In the animals this _conatus_ takes the form of appetite, in man of desire, which is "appetite with the consciousness of it."[50] But this constitutes no essential difference between appetite and desire, for "whether a man be conscious of his appetite or no, the appetite remains one and the same thing."[51] Man therefore, like the animals, is purely self-asserting and self-seeking. He can neither know nor will anything but his own being, or if he knows or wills anything else, it must be something involved in his own being. If he knows other beings, or seeks their good, it must be because their existence and their good are involved in his own. If he loves and knows God it must be because he cannot know himself without knowing God, or find his supreme good anywhere but in God.

What at first makes the language difficult to us is the identification of will and intelligence. Both are represented as affirming their objects. Descartes had prepared the way for this when he treated the will as the faculty of judging or giving assent to certain combinations of ideas, and distinguished it from the purely intellectual faculties by which the ideas are apprehended. By this distinction he had, as he supposed, secured a place for human freedom. Admitting that intelligence is under a law of necessity, he claimed for the Will a certain latitude or liberty of indifference, a power of giving or withholding assent in all cases where the relations of ideas were not absolutely clear and distinct. Spinoza points out that there is no ground for such a distinction, that the acts of apprehension and judgment cannot be separated from each other. "In the mind there is no volition, i.e. no affirmation or negation which is not immediately involved in the idea it apprehends," and therefore "intellect and will are one and the same thing."[52] If, then, there is no freedom except the liberty of indifference, freedom is impossible. Man, like all other beings and things, is under an absolute law of necessity. All the actions of his will, as well as of his intelligence, are but different forms of the self-assertive tendency to which he cannot but yield, because it is one with his very being, or only ideally distinguishable therefrom. There is, however, another idea of liberty. Liberty as the opposite of necessity is an absurdity--it is impossible for either God or man; but liberty as the opposite of slavery is possible, and it is actually possessed by God. The divine liberty consists in this, that God acts from the necessity of his own nature alone, and is not in any way determined from without. And the great question of ethics is, How far can man partake in this liberty? At first it would seem impossible that he should partake in it. He is a finite being, whose power is infinitely surpassed by the power of other beings to which he is related. His body acts only as it is acted on, and his mind cannot therefore apprehend his body, except as affected by other things. His self-assertion and self-seeking are therefore confused with the asserting and seeking of other things, and are never pure. His thought and activity cannot be understood except through the influence of other things which lie outside of his consciousness, and upon which his will has no influence. He cannot know clearly and distinctly either himself or anything else; how then can he know his own good or determine himself by the idea of it?

The answer is the answer of Descartes, that the apprehension of any finite thing involves the adequate idea of the infinite and eternal nature of God.[53] This is the primary object of intelligence, in which alone is grounded the possibility of knowing either ourselves or anything else. In so far as our knowledge is determined by this idea, or by the ideas of other things, which are referred to this idea and seen in its light, in so far its action flows from an internal and not an external necessity. In so far, on the other hand, as we are determined by the affections of the body, ideas in which the nature of our own body and the nature of other things are confused together, in so far we are determined by an external necessity. Or to put the same thing in what has been shown to be merely another way of expression, in so far as we are determined by pure intelligence we are free, but in so far as we are determined by opinion and imagination we are slaves.

From these premises it is easy to see what form the opposition of reason and passion must necessarily take with Spinoza. The passions belong to our nature as finite; they are grounded on, or rather are but another form of inadequate ideas; but we are free only in so far as our ideas either immediately are, or can be made, adequate. Our idea of God is adequate _ex vi termini_; our ideas of the affections of our body are inadequate, but can be made adequate in so far as they are referred to the idea of God. And as the idea of God is purely affirmative, this reference to the idea of God implies the elimination of the negative element from the ideas of the affections of the body, "for nothing that is positive in a false idea is removed by the presence of truth as such."[54] Brought into contact with the idea of God, all ideas become true and adequate, by the removal of the negative or false element in them. The idea of God is, as it were, the touchstone which distinguishes the gold from the dross. It enables us to detect the higher spiritual element in the natural passions, and to sever the element belonging to that pure love of self which is identical with the love of perfection from the elements belonging to that impure love of our own finite individuality as such which is identical with the love of evil.

Implicit difficulties.

The imperfection in Spinoza's development of this principle has already been indicated. It is in fact the same imperfection which runs through his whole system. Just as he supposed that the ideas of finite things were at once made consistent with the idea of the infinite when he had named them modes, so here his conception of the change through which selfish natural desire must pass in order to become spiritual is far too superficial and external. Hence he has no sympathy with asceticism, but treats it, like Bentham, as a _torva el tristis superstitio_. Joy is the "transition from less to greater perfection," and cannot be but good; pain is the "transition from greater to less perfection," and cannot be but evil. The revolt against the medieval opposition of the nature and spirit is visible in many of his sayings. "No Deity who is not envious can delight in my weakness or hurts, or can regard as virtues those fears and sighs and tears which are the signs of the mind's weakness; but contrariwise, the greater is our joy, the greater is our progress to perfection, and our participation in the divine nature."[55] "A free man thinks of nothing less than death, his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life."[56] The same idea, combining with the idea of necessity, leads him to condemn repentance and pity, as well as pride and humility. Unconsciously, Spinoza reproduces the principle of asceticism, while in words he utterly rejects it. For though he tells us that pure self-complacency is the highest thing we can hope, yet from this self-complacency all regard to the finite individuality of the subject is eliminated. "Qui Deum amat, conari non potest ut Deus ipsum contra amet." In like manner, he absolutely condemns all hatred, envy, rivalry and ambition, as springing out of an over-estimate of those finite things which one only can possess, while the highest good is that which is enjoyed the more easily and fully the greater the number of participants. Yet Spinoza's exaltation of the social life, and of the love that binds it together, is too like the Buddhist's universal charity that embraces all creatures, and all creatures equally. Both are based on an abstraction from all that is individual, only the Buddhist's abstraction goes a step further, and erases even the distinction between man and the animals. Spinoza felt the pressure of this all-levelling logic when he said, "I confess I cannot understand how spirits express God more than the other creatures, for I know that between the finite and the infinite there is no proportion, and that the distinction between God and the most excellent of created things differs not a whit from the distinction between him and the lowest and meanest of them."[57] As Pope said, God is "as full and perfect in a hair as a heart"; in all finite things there is a ray of divinity, and in nothing more than a ray. Yet in another epistle Spinoza contradicts this view, and declares that, while he does not consider it necessary to "know Christ after the flesh, he does think it is necessary to know the eternal Son of God, i.e. God's eternal wisdom, which is manifested in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Christ Jesus."[58] In the _Ethics_ the distinction of man and the animals is treated as an absolute distinction, and it is asserted with doubtful consistency that the human soul cannot all be destroyed along with the body, for that there is something of it which is eternal. Yet from this eternity we must, of course, eliminate all notion of the consciousness of the finite self as such. At this point, in short, the two opposite streams of Spinoza's thought, the positive method he _intends_ to pursue, and the negative or abstracting method he really _does_ pursue, meet in irreconcilable contradiction. The finite must be related to the infinite so as to preserve all that is in it of reality; and therefore its limit or the negative element in it must be abstracted from. But it turns out that, with this abstraction from a negative element involved in the existence of the finite, the positive also disappears, and God is all in all in a sense that absolutely excludes the existence of the finite. "The mind's intellectual love of God," says Spinoza, "is the very love wherewith God loves himself, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be expressed by the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity; i.e. the mind's intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself."[59] This double "in so far," which returns so frequently in Spinoza, just conceals for a moment the contradiction of two streams of thought, one of which must be swallowed up by the other, if they are once allowed to meet.

General importance of the Cartesian school.