As to what you maintain that God has nothing formally in common with created things, I have established the contrary in my definition for I have said, God is a Being constituted by an infinity of infinite attributes, that is to say perfect, each in its kind. The attributes which correspond to human attributes, he considered as existing in God after an infinite manner indeed, yet not as differing in kind from the finite. That Spinoza believed in the humanity* of God is evident from what he says in another place: "The will of God, by which He wills to love Himself, follows necessarily from His infinite understanding, by which He knows Himself. But how these are distinguished from each other, namely, His essence, the understanding by which He knows Himself, and the will by which He wills to love Himself we place among the things which we desire to know. Nor do we forget the word personality, which theologians sometimes use to explain this matter. But though we are not ignorant of the word, we nevertheless confess our ignorance of its meaning, nor can we form any clear and distinct conception of it, although we constantly believe in the most blessed vision which is promised to the faithful that God will reveal even this to His own. That will and power are not distinguished from the understanding of God we have shown from this that He not only decreed things to exist, but to exist with such a nature, that is that their essence and their existence depended on the will and power of God; from which we plainly and distinctly perceive that the understanding of God His power and His will, by which He has created, and has known created things, preserves them and loves them, are in nowise to be distinguished but only in respect of our thoughts."

"He did not merely receive the witness of a one God from his mother's lips. The voice which spoke to Moses out of the bush was uttering itself in his generation. It was no cunningly devised fable, no story of another day. There was a witness for it in the very nature and being of man; it might be brought forth in hard forms of geometry. In those forms it necessarily became contracted. Its life, its personality, were always threatening to disappear. The I am seems in the act of passing into the Being. (Mr. Maurice means Plato's ontological Deity, whom we have identified with the One of Parmenides.) But the change is never fully accomplished. The living God spoke still to the modern sage. He conld not shake off the belief that His voice was in some way to be heard in the Bible. With all his physical science, all his reverence for the light of nature he bows before the God of his fathers. There is awe and trembling in the worshipper. Though so clear in his perceptions, though so calm in his utterances, he often shrinks and becomes confused in that presence. He does not feel that he is alone in it: all men are dwelling in it: were it withdrawn all would perish."-Modern Philosophy, by the Rev. F. D. Maurice.

MAN HAS NO FREE WILL.

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Spinoza ascribed to God a kind of freedom: a free necessity. But to created existences even this kind of freedom is denied. 'There is nothing contingent in the nature of beings; all things on the contrary are determined by the necessity of the Divine nature, to exist and to act, after a certain fashion.' 'Nature produced' is determined by nature producing.' It does not act; it is acted upon. The soul of man is a Spiritual automaton. It is not an empire within an empire. It does not belong to itself; it belongs to nature. It does not make its destiny; it submits to a destiny made for it. Every individual acts according to its being, and that being is grounded in the Being of God. There can be nothing arbitrary in the necessary developments of the Divine essence. There can be no disorder in that perpetual movement which incessantly creates, destroys, and renews all things. The harmony of the all is so perfect in itself, and all its unfoldings, that no possibility is left for free will in the creature. Every being is determined to existence and to action by another being, and so on for ever. Movements produce movements, and ideas generate ideas according to a law founded upon the very nature of thought and extension, and in a perfect correspondence which again has for its foundation the identity of thought and extension in God. We imagine ourselves to be free, but it is only imagination. It is a delusion arising from our ignorance of the motives which determine us to action. When we think that in virtue of any self-determining power in the soul, we can speak or be silent as we choose, we dream with our eyes open. Were a man placed like the schoolmen's ass between two bundles of hay, each of which had equal attractions for him, he could decide for neither. If hay were his food he would die of hunger rather than make a choice. And if equally placed between two pails of water he would die of thirst. Of course he would be an ass if he did, says a supposed objector, to which Spinoza has no other answer, but that he would not know what to think of such a man. The old and stubborn objection to this doctrine will arise in every reader's mind. Is God then the author of sin? Spinoza answers that sin is nothing positive. It exists for us but not for God. The same things which appear hateful in men are regarded with admiration in animals; such, for instance, as the wars of bees and the jealousies of wood pigeons. It follows then that sin, which only expresses an imperfection, cannot consist in anything which expresses a reality. We speak improperly, applying human language to what is above human language, when we say that we sin against God, or that men offend God.

No

thing can exist, and no event can happen, contrary to the will of God. The command given to Adam consisted simply in this, that God revealed to him that eating the forbidden fruit would cause death. In the same way He reveals to us, by the natural light of our minds, that poison is mortal. If you ask for what end was this revelation given? I answer: To render him so much more perfect in the order of knowledge. To ask then of God, why He has not given to Adam a more perfect will is as absurd as to ask why He has not given to the circle the properties of the square.' The consequence, which seems to us naturally to follow from this doctrine, is that there is no difference between virtue and vice: good and bad. But this Spinoza does not admit. There is a difference between perfection and imperfection. The wicked, after their own manner, express the will of God. They are instruments in His hand. He uses them as His instruments, but destroys them in the use. It is true they are wicked by necessity, but they are not on that account less hurtful or less to be feared. We are in the hands of God as the clay in the hand of the potter, who, of the same lump, makes one vessel to honor and another to dishonor.

In a system where all is necessary, and where sin is only privation of reality, the distinction between good and evil cannot be more than relative. Our knowledge of things is imperfect. When we imagine, we think that we know. If nature, and the chain of causes were not hidden from our weak sight, every existence would appear to us, as it is, finished and perfect. Our ideas of good and evil, perfection and imperfection, like those of beauty and ugliness, are not children of reason but of imagination. They express nothing absolute-nothing which belongs to being. They but mark the weakness of the human mind. That which is easily imagined we call beautiful and well-formed, but that which we have difficulty in imagining appears to us without beauty or order. What we call a fault in nature, such as a man born blind, is only a negation in nature. We compare such a man with one who sees, but nature is no more at fault than in denying sight to stones. For man however there exists good and evil relatively if not absolutely. But these are resolved into the useful and the injurious. A thing at the same time may be good, bad, or indifferent. Music for instance is good for a melancholy man, but for a deaf man it is neither good nor bad. Goodness is but the abstraction we make from things which gives us pleasure. We do not desire them because they are good, but onr desire invests them with a supposed

MIGHT IS RIGHT.

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goodness. To the pursuit of what is agreeable, and the hatred of the contrary, man is compelled by his nature, for every one desires or rejects by necessity, according to the laws of his nature, that which he judges good or bad.' To follow this impulse is not only a necessity but it is the right and the duty of every man, and everyone should be reckoned an enemy who wishes to hinder another in the gratification of the impulses of his nature. The measure of everyone's right is his power. The best right is that of the strongest, and as the wise man has an absolute right to do all which reason dictates, or the right of living according to the laws of reason, so also the ignorant and foolish man has a right to live according to the laws of appetite.‡

The introduction of predestination, or necessity into Spinoza's system gives it an aspect of terror. The heart of man recoils from that stern fatalism which makes men good or bad, and leads them on to reward or punishment, not according to what they are by choice, but according to what necessity has made them. But like all predestinarians Spinoza was happily inconsistent. The fact that we are predestined, must not influence us in our efforts. We must act as if no such predestination existed. The end Spinoza had in all his speculations, was to find a supreme good, such as would satisfy an immortal spirit. He exercised his reason with all earnestness, that

The following are the DEFINITIONS in the third book—the subject of which is the nature and origin of the passions:

I. I call adequate cause, that the effect of which can be clearly and distinctly perceived by itself, and inadequate or partial, that the effect of which cannot be conceived by itself alone.

II. When anything happens in us or outside of us, of which we are the adequate cause, that is to say, when anything, in us or outside of us, follows from our nature, which can be conceived by it clearly and distinctly, I call that acting. When, on the contrary, anything happens in us, or results from our nature, of which we are not the cause, not even partially, I call that suffering. III. I understand by passions those affections of the body which increase or diminish, favor, or hinder its power of acting, and I understand also, at the same time, the ideas of these affections.

This is why, if we can be the adequate cause of any one of these affections, passion then expresses an action; in every other case it is a true passion.

PROPOSITIONS.

Our soul does certain actions, and suffers certain passions; namely, so far as it has adequate ideas, it does certain actions; and so far as it has inadequate ideas it suffers certain passions.

The actions of the soul come only from adequate ideas, passions only from inadequate.

Everything so far as it is, is forced to persevere in its own being.

The effort by which everything tends to persevere in its own being, is nothing more than the actual essence of that thing.

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THE LIFE OF REASON.

he might know himself and God; and find that which would give him joy when temporal pursuits and pleasures failed him. The existence of good and evil, perfection and imperfection, taken in the moral sense given to them in the human consciousness, he denied. But he denied their existence only to re-affirm it in a higher, and as he reckoned, the only true sense. He had started with the perfection of God. We have an idea of such a perfection: an adequate idea of One who is the Perfect. The infinite number of modes which emanate from the Divine attributes are less perfect, and yet each in its rank of being expresses the absolute perfection of Being in itself. There is then an absolute perfection and a relative perfection; the latter including a necessary mixture of imperfection. Everything is perfect according to the measure of reality which it possesses, and imperfect just as it lacks reality. What is good for man is that which is useful-that which brings him joy and takes away sorrow. Joy is the passage of the soul to a greater perfection, and sorrow to a less perfection; in other words, joy is the desire satisfied, and sorrow the desire opposed. The ruling desire in man is to continue in being: to be more that which he is. Our duty is to know what is the supreme good-the good of the soul. We need not interrupt Spinoza with any questions about duty when he has denied us free will. He will answer, that is altogether a different question, and one that should not interfere with our striving after perfection. It is a man's right, as well as the law of his nature to strive to continue in being. But there are two ways by which this may be done; one is blind brutal appetite, the other is the desire which is guided by reason. Now reason

avails more than appetite. Reason is master of the passions, appetite is their slave. Reason thinks of the future, appetite only of the present. It belongs to reason to think of things under the form of eternity; it affects the soul as powerfully with the desire of good things to come, as with those that now are. Its joys are not delusive and fleeting but solid and enduring. It nourishes the soul with a blessedness which no time can change. Reason leads us to God and to the love of God. The life of reason is then the highest life, the happiest, the most perfect, the richest, that is to say, the life in which the being of man is most possessed and increased. By reason, man is free. He then regulates his life by a clear and adequate idea of the true value both of the temporal and the eternal. The cause of

this we can see in the very nature of the soul. It is an idea: a thought. Its activity is in the exercise of thought. The more