Books: Pages from a Journal with Other Papers
M >>
Mark Rutherford >> Pages from a Journal with Other Papers
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12
One night grey bars appeared in the western sky, but they had too often
deluded us, and we did not believe in them. On this particular evening
they were a little heavier, and the window-cords were damp. The air
which came across the cliff was cool, and if we had dared to hope we
should have said it had a scent of the sea in it. At four o'clock in
the morning there was a noise of something beating against the panes--
they were streaming! It was impossible to lie still, and I rose and
went out of doors. No creature was stirring, there was no sound save
that of the rain, but a busier time there had not been for many a long
month. Thousands of millions of blades of grass and corn were eagerly
drinking. For sixteen hours the downpour continued, and when it was
dusk I again went out. The watercourses by the side of the roads had a
little water in them, but not a drop had reached those at the edge of
the fields, so thirsty was the earth. The drought, thank God, was at an
end!
SPINOZA
Now that twenty years have passed since I began the study of Spinoza it
is good to find that he still holds his ground. Much in him remains
obscure, but there is enough which is sufficiently clear to give a
direction to thought and to modify action. To the professional
metaphysician Spinoza's work is already surpassed, and is absorbed in
subsequent systems. We are told to read him once because he is
historically interesting, and then we are supposed to have done with
him. But if "Spinozism," as it is called, is but a stage of development
there is something in Spinoza which can be superseded as little as the
Imitation of Christ or the Pilgrim's Progress, and it is this which
continues to draw men to him. Goethe never cared for set philosophical
systems. Very early in life he thought he had found out that they were
useless pieces of construction, but to the end of his days he clung to
Spinoza, and Philina, of all persons in the world, repeats one of the
finest sayings in the Ethic. So far as the metaphysicians are
carpenters, and there is much carpentering in most of them, Goethe was
right, and the larger part of their industry endures wind and weather
but for a short time. Spinoza's object was not to make a scheme of the
universe. He felt that the things on which men usually set their hearts
give no permanent satisfaction, and he cast about for some means by
which to secure "a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity." I
propose now, without attempting to connect or contrast Spinoza with
Descartes or the Germans, to name some of those thoughts in his books by
which he conceived he had attained his end.
The sorrow of life is the rigidity of the material universe in which we
are placed. We are bound by physical laws, and there is a constant
pressure of matter-of-fact evidence to prove that we are nothing but
common and cheap products of the earth to which in a few moments or
years we return. Spinoza's chief aim is to free us from this sorrow,
and to free us from it by THINKING. The emphasis on this word is
important. He continually insists that a thing is not unreal because we
cannot imagine it. His own science, mathematics, affords him examples
of what MUST be, although we cannot picture it, and he believes that
true consolation lies in the region of that which cannot be imaged but
can be thought.
Setting out on his quest, he lays hold at the very beginning on the idea
of Substance, which he afterwards identifies with the idea of God. "By
Substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through
itself; in other words, that, the conception of which does not need the
conception of another thing from which it must be formed." {34a} "By
God, I understand Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance
consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal
and infinite essence." {34b} "God, or substance consisting of infinite
attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence,
necessarily exists." {34c} By the phrases "in itself" and "by itself,"
we are to understand that this conception cannot be explained in other
terms. Substance must be posited, and there we must leave it. The
demonstration of the last-quoted proposition, the 11th, is elusive, and
I must pass it by, merely observing that the objection that no idea
involves existence, and that consequently the idea of God does not
involve it, is not a refutation of Spinoza, who might rejoin that it is
impossible not to affirm existence of God as the Ethic defines him.
Spinoza escapes one great theological difficulty. Directly we begin to
reflect we are dissatisfied with a material God, and the nobler
religions assert that God is a Spirit. But if He be a pure spirit
whence comes the material universe? To Spinoza pure spirit and pure
matter are mere artifices of the understanding. His God is the
Substance with infinite attributes of which thought and extension are
the two revealed to man, and he goes further, for he maintains that they
are one and the same thing viewed in different ways, inside and outside
of the same reality. The conception of God, strictly speaking, is not
incomprehensible, but it is not CIRCUM-prehensible; if it were it could
not be the true conception of Him.
Spinoza declares that "the human mind possesses an adequate knowledge of
the eternal and infinite essence of God" {36}--not of God in His
completeness, but it is adequate. The demonstration of this proposition
is at first sight unsatisfactory, because we look for one which shall
enable us to form an image of God like that which we can form of a
triangle. But we cannot have "a knowledge of God as distinct as that
which we have of common notions, because we cannot imagine God as we can
bodies." "To your question," says Spinoza to Boxel, "whether I have as
clear an idea of God as I have of a triangle? I answer, Yes. But if
you ask me whether I have as clear an image of God as I have of a
triangle I shall say, No; for we cannot imagine God, but we can in a
measure understand Him. Here also, it is to be observed that I do not
say that I altogether know God, but that I understand some of His
attributes--not all, nor the greatest part, and it is clear that my
ignorance of very many does not prevent my knowledge of certain others.
When I learned the elements of Euclid, I very soon understood that the
three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and I clearly
perceived this property of a triangle, although I was ignorant of many
others." {37a}
"Individual things are nothing but affections or modes of God's
attributes, expressing those attributes in a certain and determinate
manner," {37b} and hence "the more we understand individual objects, the
more we understand God." {37c}
The intellect of God in no way resembles the human intellect, for we
cannot conceive Him as proposing an end and considering the means to
attain it. "The intellect of God, in so far as it is conceived to
constitute His essence, is in truth the cause of things, both of their
essence and of their existence--a truth which seems to have been
understood by those who have maintained that God's intellect, will, and
power are one and the same thing." {37d}
The whole of God is FACT, and Spinoza denies any reserve in Him of
something unexpressed. "The omnipotence of God has been actual from
eternity, and in the same actuality will remain to eternity," {38} not
of course in the sense that everything which exists has always existed
as we now know it, or that nothing will exist hereafter which does not
exist now, but that in God everything that has been, and will be,
eternally IS.
The reader will perhaps ask, What has this theology to do with the "joy
continuous and supreme"? We shall presently meet with some deductions
which contribute to it, but it is not difficult to understand that
Spinoza, to use his own word, might call the truths set forth in these
propositions "blessed." Let a man once believe in that God of infinite
attributes of which thought and extension are those by which He
manifests Himself to us; let him see that the opposition between thought
and matter is fictitious; that his mind "is a part of the infinite
intellect of God"; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter
of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and
he will feel a relationship with infinity which will emancipate him.
It is not true that in Spinoza's God there is so little that is positive
that it is not worth preserving. All Nature is in Him, and if the
objector is sincere he will confess that it is not the lack of contents
in the idea which is disappointing, but a lack of contents particularly
interesting to himself.
The opposition between the mind and body of man as two diverse entities
ceases with that between thought and extension. It would be impossible
briefly to explain in all its fulness what Spinoza means by the
proposition: "The object of the idea constituting the human mind is a
body" {39}; it is sufficient here to say that, just as extension and
thought are one, considered in different aspects, so body and mind are
one. We shall find in the fifth part of the Ethic that Spinoza affirms
the eternity of the mind, though not perhaps in the way in which it is
usually believed.
Following the order of the Ethic we now come to its more directly
ethical maxims. Spinoza denies the freedom commonly assigned to the
will, or perhaps it is more correct to say he denies that it is
intelligible. The will is determined by the intellect. The idea of the
triangle involves the affirmation or volition that its three angles are
equal to two right angles. If we understand what a triangle is we are
not "free" to believe that it contains more or less than two right
angles, nor to act as if it contained more or less than two. The only
real freedom of the mind is obedience to the reason, and the mind is
enslaved when it is under the dominion of the passions. "God does not
act from freedom of the will," {40a} and consequently "things could have
been produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than that
in which they have been produced." {40b}
"If you will but reflect," Spinoza tells Boxel, "that indifference is
nothing but ignorance or doubt, and that a will always constant and in
all things determinate is a virtue and a necessary property of the
intellect, you will see that my words are entirely in accord with the
truth." {40c} To the same effect is a passage in a letter to
Blyenbergh, "Our liberty does not consist in a certain contingency nor
in a certain indifference, but in the manner of affirming or denying, so
that in proportion as we affirm or deny anything with less indifference,
are we the more free." {41a} So also to Schuller, "I call that thing
free which exists and acts solely from the necessity of its own nature:
I call that thing coerced which is determined to exist and to act in a
certain and determinate manner by another." {41b} With regard to this
definition it might be objected that the necessity does not lie solely
in the person who wills but is also in the object. The triangle as well
as the nature of man contains the necessity. What Spinoza means is that
the free man by the necessity of his nature is bound to assert the truth
of what follows from the definition of a triangle and that the stronger
he feels the necessity the more free he is. Hence it follows that the
wider the range of the intellect and the more imperative the necessity
which binds it, the larger is its freedom.
In genuine freedom Spinoza rejoices. "The doctrine is of service in so
far as it teaches us that we do everything by the will of God alone, and
that we are partakers of the divine nature in proportion as our actions
become more and more perfect and we more and more understand God. This
doctrine, therefore, besides giving repose in every way to the soul, has
also this advantage, that it teaches us in what our highest happiness or
blessedness consists, namely, in the knowledge of God alone, by which we
are drawn to do those things only which love and piety persuade." {42a}
In other words, being part of the whole, the grandeur and office of the
whole are ours. We are anxious about what we call "personality," but in
truth there is nothing in it of any worth, and the less we care for it
the more "blessed" we are.
"By the desire which springs from reason we follow good directly and
avoid evil indirectly" {42b}: our aim should be the good; in obtaining
that we are delivered from evil. To the same purpose is the conclusion
of the fifth book of the Ethic that "No one delights in blessedness
because he has restrained his affects, but, on the contrary, the power
of restraining his lusts springs from blessedness itself." {43a} This
is exactly what the Gospel says to the Law.
Fear is not the motive of a free man to do what is good. "A free man
thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is not a meditation
upon death, but upon life." {43b} This is the celebrated sixty-seventh
proposition of the fourth part. If we examine the proof which directly
depends on the sixty-third proposition of the same part--"he who is led
by fear, and does what is good in order that he may avoid what is evil,
is not led by reason"--we shall see that Spinoza is referring to the
fear of the "evil" of hell-fire.
All Spinoza's teaching with regard to the passions is a consequence of
what he believes of God and man. He will study the passions and not
curse them. He finds that by understanding them "we can bring it to
pass that we suffer less from them. We have, therefore, mainly to
strive to acquire a clear and distinct knowledge of each affect." {43c}
"If the human mind had none but adequate ideas it would form no notion
of evil." {44a} "The difference between a man who is led by affect or
opinion alone and one who is led by reason" is that "the former, whether
he wills it or not, does those things of which he is entirely ignorant,
but the latter does the will of no one but himself." {44b} THEY KNOW
NOT WHAT THEY DO.
The direct influence of Spinoza's theology is also shown in his
treatment of pity, hatred, laughter, and contempt. "The man who has
properly understood that everything follows from the necessity of the
divine nature, and comes to pass according to the eternal laws and rules
of nature, will in truth discover nothing which is worthy of hatred,
laughter, or contempt, nor will he pity any one, but, so far as human
virtue is able, he will endeavour to DO WELL, as we say, and to
REJOICE." {44c} By pity is to be understood mere blind sympathy. The
good that we do by this pity with the eyes of the mind shut ought to be
done with them open. "He who lives according to the guidance of reason
strives as much as possible to repay the hatred, anger, or contempt of
others towards himself with love or generosity. . . . He who wishes to
avenge injuries by hating in return does indeed live miserably. But he
who, on the contrary, strives to drive out hatred by love, fights
joyfully and confidently, with equal ease resisting one man or a number
of men, and needing scarcely any assistance from fortune. Those whom he
conquers yield gladly, not from defect of strength, but from an increase
of it." {45a}
"Joy is the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection:
sorrow, on the other hand, is the passion by which it passes to a less
perfection." {45b} "No God and no human being, except an envious one,
is delighted by my impotence or my trouble, or esteems as any virtue in
us tears, sighs, fears, and other things of this kind, which are signs
of mental impotence; on the contrary, the greater the joy with which we
are affected, the greater the perfection to which we pass thereby; that
is to say, the more do we necessarily partake of the divine nature."
{46} It would be difficult to find an account of joy and sorrow which
is closer to the facts than that which Spinoza gives. He lived amongst
people Roman Catholic and Protestant who worshipped sorrow. Sorrow was
the divinely decreed law of life and joy was merely a permitted
exception. He reversed this order and his claim to be considered in
this respect as one of the great revolutionary religious and moral
reformers has not been sufficiently recognised. It is remarkable that,
unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an
exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction,
but by simple sanity which requires no correction. One reason for this
peculiarity is that the Ethic was the result of long meditation. It was
published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before
his death. Usually what we call our convictions are propositions which
we have not thoroughly examined in quietude, but notions which have just
come into our heads and are irreversible to us solely because we are
committed to them. Much may be urged against the Ethic and on behalf of
hatred, contempt, and sorrow. The "other side" may be produced
mechanically to almost every truth; the more easily, the more divine
that truth is, and against no truths is it producible with less genuine
mental effort than against those uttered by the founder of Christianity.
The question, however, if we are dealing with the New Testament, is not
whether the Sermon on the Mount can be turned inside out in a debating
society, but whether it does not represent better than anything which
the clever leader of the opposition can formulate the principle or
temper which should govern our conduct.
There is a group of propositions in the last part of the Ethic, which,
although they are difficult, it may be well to notice, because they were
evidently regarded by Spinoza as helping him to the end he had in view.
The difficulty lies in a peculiar combination of religious ideas and
scientific form. These propositions are the following:- {47}
"The mind can cause all the affections of the body or the images of
things to be related to the idea of God."
"He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his affects loves
God, and loves Him better the better he understands himself and his
affects."
"This love to God above everything else ought to occupy the mind."
"God is free from passions, nor is He affected with any affect of joy or
sorrow."
"No one can hate God."
"He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return."
"This love to God cannot be defiled either by the effect of envy or
jealousy, but is the more strengthened the more people we imagine to be
connected with God by the same bond of love."
The proof of the first of these propositions, using language somewhat
different from that of the text, is as follows:- There is no affection
of the body of which the mind cannot form some clear and distinct
conception, that is to say, of everything perceived it is capable of
forming a clear and adequate idea, not exhaustive, as Spinoza is careful
to warn us, but an idea not distorted by our personality, and one which
is in accordance with the thing itself, adequate as far as it goes.
Newton's perception that the moon perpetually falls to the earth by the
same numerical law under which a stone falls to it was an adequate
perception. "Therefore," continues the demonstration (quoting the
fifteenth proposition of the first part--"Whatever is, is in God, and
nothing can either be or be conceived without God"), "the mind can cause
all the affections of the body to be related to the idea of God."
Spinoza, having arrived at his adequate idea thus takes a further step
to the idea of God. What is perceived is not an isolated external
phenomenon. It is a reality in God: it IS God: there is nothing more
to be thought or said of God than the affirmation of such realities as
these. The "relation to the idea of God" means that in the affirmation
He is affirmed. "Nothing," that is to say, no reality "can be conceived
without God."
But it is possible for the word "love" to be applied to the relationship
between man and God. He who has a clear and adequate perception passes
to greater perfection, and therefore rejoices. Joy, accompanied with
the idea of a cause, is love. By the fourteenth proposition this joy is
accompanied by the idea of God as its cause, and therefore love to God
follows. The demonstration seems formal, and we ask ourselves, What is
the actual emotion which Spinoza describes? It is not new to him, for
in the Short Treatise, which is an early sketch for the Ethic, he thus
writes:- "Hence it follows incontrovertibly that it is knowledge which
is the cause of love, so that when we learn to know God in this way, we
must necessarily unite ourselves to Him, for He cannot be known, nor can
he reveal Himself, save as that which is supremely great and good. In
this union alone, as we have already said, our happiness consists. I do
not say that we must know Him adequately; but it is sufficient for us,
in order to be united with Him, to know Him in a measure, for the
knowledge we have of the body is not of such a kind that we can know it
as it is or perfectly; and yet what a union! what love!" {50}
Perhaps it may clear the ground a little if we observe that Spinoza
often avoids a negative by a positive statement. Here he may intend to
show us what the love of God is not, that it is not what it is described
in the popular religion to be. "The only love of God I know," we may
imagine him saying, "thus arises. The adequate perception is the
keenest of human joys for thereby I see God Himself. That which I see
is not a thing or a person, but nevertheless what I feel towards it can
be called by no other name than love. Although the object of this love
is not thing or person it is not indefinite, it is this only which is
definite; 'thing' and 'person' are abstract and unreal. There was a
love to God in Kepler's heart when the three laws were revealed to him.
If it was not love to God, what is love to Him?"
To the eighteenth proposition, "No one can hate God," there is a
scholium which shows that the problem of pain which Spinoza has left
unsolved must have occurred to him. "But some may object that if we
understand God to be the cause of all things, we do for that very reason
consider Him to be the cause of sorrow. But I reply that in so far as
we understand the causes of sorrow, it ceases to be a passion (Prop. 3,
pt. 5), that is to say (Prop. 59, pt. 3) it ceases to be a sorrow; and
therefore in so far as we understand God to be the cause of sorrow do we
rejoice." The third proposition of the fifth part which he quotes
merely proves that in so far as we understand passion it ceases to be a
passion. He replies to those "who ask why God has not created all men
in such a manner that they might be controlled by the dictates of reason
alone," {52} "Because to Him material was not wanting for the creation
of everything, from the highest down to the very lowest grade of
perfection; or, to speak more properly, because the laws of His nature
were so ample that they sufficed for the production of everything which
can be conceived by an infinite intellect." Nevertheless of pain we
have no explanation. Pain is not lessened by understanding it, nor is
its mystery penetrated if we see that to God material could not have
been wanting for the creation of men or animals who have to endure it
all their lives. But if Spinoza is silent in the presence of pain, so
also is every religion and philosophy which the world has seen. Silence
is the only conclusion of the Book of Job, and patient fortitude in the
hope of future enlightenment is the conclusion of Christianity.
It is a weak mistake, however, to put aside what religions and
philosophies tell us because it is insufficient. To Job it is not
revealed why suffering is apportioned so unequally or why it exists, but
the answer of the Almighty from the whirlwind he cannot dispute, and
although Spinoza has nothing more to say about pain than he says in the
passages just quoted and was certainly not exempt from it himself, it
may be impossible that any man should hate God.
We now come to the final propositions of the Ethic, those in which
Spinoza declares his belief in the eternity of mind. The twenty-second
and twenty-third propositions of the fifth part are as follows:-
"In God, nevertheless, there necessarily exists an idea which expresses
the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity."
"The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but
something of it remains which is eternal."
The word "nevertheless" is a reference to the preceding proposition
which denies the continuity of memory or imagination excepting so long
as the body lasts. The demonstration of the twenty-third proposition is
not easy to grasp, but the substance of it is that although the mind is
the idea of the body, that is to say, the mind is body as thought and
body is thought as extension, the mind, or essence of the body, is not
completely destroyed with the body. It exists as an eternal idea, and
by an eternal necessity in God. Here again we must not think of that
personality which is nothing better than a material notion, an image
from the concrete applied to mind, but we must cling fast to thought, to
the thoughts which alone makes us what we ARE, and these, says Spinoza,
are in God and are not to be defined by time. They have always been and
always will be. The enunciation of the thirty-third proposition is,
"The intellectual love of God which arises from the third kind of
knowledge is eternal." The "third kind of knowledge" is that intuitive
science which "advances from an adequate idea of the formal essence of
certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of
things; {54} "No love except intellectual love is eternal," {55a} and
the scholium to this proposition adds, "If we look at the common opinion
of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of
their minds, but they confound it with duration, and attribute it to
imagination or memory, which they believe remain after death." The
intellectual love of the mind towards God is the very "love with which
He loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He
can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered
under the form of eternity; that is to say, the intellectual love of the
mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves
Himself." {55b} "Hence it follows that God, in so far as He loves
Himself, loves men, and consequently that the love of God towards men
and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one and the same
thing." {55c} The more adequate ideas the mind forms "the less it
suffers from those affects which are evil, and the less it fears death"
because "the greater is that part which remains unharmed, and the less
consequently does it suffer from the affects." It is possible even "for
the human mind to be of such a nature that that part of it which we have
shown perishes with its body, in comparison with the part of it which
remains, is of no consequence." {56a}
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12