Short Studies on Great Subjects Part 18

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.

Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether they were trying to do better--whether, at any rate, they were endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them.

But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose, covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we do we should consecrate ourselves to G.o.d, and our own lips condemn us; for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The _devoir_ of a knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like t.i.tans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants, we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,--that they can purify themselves, can live n.o.ble and worthy lives,--unless this is set before them as _the_ thing which they are to do, and _can_ succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for G.o.d, they will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is, that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought.

The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person, to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one remedy which will avail--that the thing which we call public opinion learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pa.s.s at once into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect money, we respect rank, we respect ability--character is as if it had no existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.

Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of our material splendour an advance of the race.

In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present, creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this difficulty solved--suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one n.o.ble soul outweighs the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the universe--the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] _Westminster Review_, 1853.

[H] 1. _Die poetischen Bucher des Alten Bundes._ Erklart von Heinrich Ewald. Gottingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.

2. _Kurz gefa.s.stes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament._ Zweite Lieferung. _Hiob._ Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.

3. _Quaestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen._ Von D. Hermannus Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.

[I] Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed.

[J] See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.

[K] An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between heaven and earth.

[L] The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and G.o.d's appearance, is now decisively p.r.o.nounced by Hebrew scholars not to be genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that G.o.d's honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled'

against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job, because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the _Theodice_, such, we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he lived.

[M] See the Thirteenth Article.

SPINOZA.[N]

_Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politic.u.m._ Edidit et ill.u.s.travit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halae ad Salam. J. F. Lippert.

1852.

This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings are acquiring that fact.i.tious importance which attaches to the most insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will further ill.u.s.trate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself with grinding gla.s.ses for optical instruments, an art which he had been taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the endors.e.m.e.nt of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'

The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple, but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect a blemish in his character--that, except so far as his opinions were blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of such a man,--a lesson which he taught equally by example and in word,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful language,--'Just.i.tia et caritas unic.u.m et certissimum verae fidei Catholicae signum est, et veri Spiritus Sancti fructus: et ubic.u.mque haec reperiuntur, ibi Christus re vera est, et ubic.u.mque haec desunt deest Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem just.i.tiae et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.

Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either the points of disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance--or there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant under a difference of words--or else the real truth is something different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is representing some important element which the others ignore or forget.

In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success; Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether, we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to produce some effect upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form which as yet it has a.s.sumed. Whatever may have been the case with Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself thoroughly understood.

And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott trunkner Mann_--a G.o.d intoxicated man: an expression which has been quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.

With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione Intellectus.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to epitomise it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He desired to subst.i.tute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these _verae ideae_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the ill.u.s.tration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious and Platonic.

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one, and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these, he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything, and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four.

We know a thing--

1. i. _Ex mero auditu_: because we have heard it from some person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to question.

ii. _Ab experientia vaga_: from general experience: for instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we are ignorant.

2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the laws of its phenomena, and see them following in their sequence in the order of nature.

3. Finally, we know a thing, _ex scientia intuitiva_, which alone is absolutely clear and certain.

To ill.u.s.trate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not understand it.

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.

A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very simplest truths, _non nisi simplicissimae veritates_, can be perceived; but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and the true ideas, the _verae ideae_, which are apprehended by this faculty of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'

All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius scire. Hinc patet quod cert.i.tudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam objectivam.... c.u.m itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum veritatis quaerere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia illa idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)

Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say _is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We are to see, however, what these _ideae_ are which are offered to us as self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them, in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_, and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to 'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--

DEFINITIONS.

1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which cannot be conceived except as existing.

2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by body.

3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the conception of anything else as the cause of it.

4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance as const.i.tuting the essence of substance.

5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in something else, by and through which it is conceived.

6. G.o.d is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and infinite essence.

EXPLANATION.