A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  The life of Spinoza was very simple. His family had come to Holland from Spain, or perhaps Portugal, to escape the Inquisition. He himself was educated in Jewish learning, but found it impossible to remain orthodox. He was offered 1000 florins a year to conceal his doubts; when he refused, an attempt was made to assassinate him; when this failed, he was cursed with all the curses in Deuteronomy and with the curse that Elisha pronounced on the children who, in consequence, were torn to pieces by the she-bears. But no she-bears attacked Spinoza. He lived quietly, first at Amsterdam and then at the Hague, making his living by polishing lenses. His wants were few and simple, and he showed throughout his life a rare indifference to money. The few who knew him loved him, even if they disapproved of his principles. The Dutch government, with its usual liberalism, tolerated his opinions on theological matters, though at one time he was in bad odour politically because he sided with the De Witts against the House of Orange. At the early age of forty-three he died of phthisis.

  His chief work, the Ethics, was published posthumously. Before considering it, a few words must be said about two of his other books, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Tractatus Politicus. The former is a curious combination of biblical criticism and political theory; the latter deals with political theory only. In biblical criticism Spinoza partially anticipates modern views, particularly in assigning much later dates to various books of the Old Testament than those assigned by tradition. He endeavours throughout to show that the Scriptures can be interpreted so as to be compatible with a liberal theology.

  Spinoza’s political theory is, in the main, derived from Hobbes, in spite of the enormous temperamental difference between the two men. He holds that in a state of nature there is no right or wrong, for wrong consists in disobeying the law. He holds that the sovereign can do no wrong, and agrees with Hobbes that the Church should be entirely subordinate to the State. He is opposed to all rebellion, even against a bad government, and instances the troubles in England as a proof of the harm that comes of forcible resistance to authority. But he disagrees with Hobbes in thinking democracy the “most natural” form of government. He disagrees also in holding that subjects should not sacrifice all their rights to the sovereign. In particular, he holds freedom of opinion important. I do not quite know how he reconciles this with the opinion that religious questions should be decided by the State. I think when he says this he means that they should be decided by the State rather than the Church; in Holland the State was much more tolerant than the Church.

  Spinoza’s Ethics deals with three distinct matters. It begins with metaphysics; it then goes on to the psychology of the passions and the will; and finally it sets forth an ethic based on the preceding metaphysics and psychology. The metaphysic is a modification of Descartes, the psychology is reminiscent of Hobbes, but the ethic is original, and is what is of most value in the book. The relation of Spinoza to Descartes is in some ways not unlike the relation of Plotinus to Plato. Descartes was a many-sided man, full of intellectual curiosity, but not much burdened with moral earnestness. Although he invented “proofs” intended to support orthodox beliefs, he could have been used by sceptics as Carneades used Plato. Spinoza, although he was not without scientific interests, and even wrote a treatise on the rainbow, was in the main concerned with religion and virtue. He accepted from Descartes and his contemporaries a materialistic and deterministic physics, and sought, within this framework, to find room for reverence and a life devoted to the Good. His attempt was magnificent, and rouses admiration even in those who do not think it successful.

  The metaphysical system of Spinoza is of the type inaugurated by Parmenides. There is only one substance, “God or Nature”; nothing finite is self-subsistent. Descartes admitted three substances, God and mind and matter; it is true that, even for him, God was, in a sense, more substantial than mind and matter, since He had created them, and could, if He chose, annihilate them. But except in relation to God’s omnipotence, mind and matter were two independent substances, defined, respectively, by the attributes of thought and extension. Spinoza would have none of this. For him, thought and extension were both attributes of God. God has also an infinite number of other attributes, since He must be in every respect infinite; but these others are unknown to us. Individual souls and separate pieces of matter are, for Spinoza, adjectival; they are not things, but merely aspects of the divine Being. There can be no such personal immortality as Christians believe in, but only that impersonal sort that consists in becoming more and more one with God. Finite things are defined by their boundaries, physical or logical, that is to say, by what they are not: “all determination is negation.” There can be only one Being who is wholly positive, and He must be absolutely infinite. Hence Spinoza is led to a complete and undiluted pantheism.

  Everything, according to Spinoza, is ruled by an absolute logical necessity. There is no such thing as free will in the mental sphere or chance in the physical world. Everything that happens is a manifestation of God’s inscrutable nature, and it is logically impossible that events should be other than they are. This leads to difficulties in regard to sin, which critics were not slow to point out. One of them, observing that, according to Spinoza, everything is decreed by God and is therefore good, asks indignantly: Was it good that Nero should kill his mother? Was it good that Adam ate the apple? Spinoza answers that what was positive in these acts was good, and only what was negative was bad; but negation exists only from the point of view of finite creatures. In God, who alone is completely real, there is no negation, and therefore the evil in what to us seem sins does not exist when they are viewed as parts of the whole. This doctrine, though, in one form or another, it has been held by most mystics, cannot, obviously, be reconciled with the orthodox doctrine of sin and damnation. It is bound up with Spinoza’s complete rejection of free will. Although not at all polemical, Spinoza was too honest to conceal his opinions, however shocking to contemporaries; the abhorrence of his teaching is therefore not surprising.

  The Ethics is set forth in the style of Euclid, with definitions, axioms, and theorems; everything after the axioms is supposed to be rigorously demonstrated by deductive argument. This makes him difficult reading. A modern student, who cannot suppose that there are rigorous “proofs” of such things as he professes to establish, is bound to grow impatient with the detail of the demonstrations, which is, in fact, not worth mastering. It is enough to read the enunciations of the propositions, and to study the scholia, which contain much of what is best in the Ethics. But it would show a lack of understanding to blame Spinoza for his geometrical method. It was of the essence of his system, ethically as well as metaphysically, to maintain that everything could be demonstrated, and it was therefore essential to produce demonstrations. We cannot accept his method, but that is because we cannot accept his metaphysic. We cannot believe that the interconnections of the parts of the universe are logical, because we hold that scientific laws are to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning alone. But for Spinoza the geometrical method was necessary, and was bound up with the most essential parts of his doctrine.

  I come now to Spinoza’s theory of the emotions. This comes after a metaphysical discussion of the nature and origin of the mind, which leads up to the astonishing proposition that “the human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God.” But the passions, which are discussed in the Third Book of the Ethics, distract us and obscure our intellectual vision of the whole. “Everything,” we are told, “in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its own being.” Hence arise love and hate and strife. The psychology of Book III is entirely egoistic. “He who conceives that the object of his hate is destroyed will feel pleasure.” “If we conceive that anyone takes delight in something, which only one person can possess, we shall endeavour to bring it about, that the man in question shall not gain possession thereof.” But even in this Book there are moments when Spinoza abandons the appearance of mathematically de
monstrated cynicism, as when he says: “Hatred is increased by being reciprocated, and can on the other hand be destroyed by love.” Self-preservation is the fundamental motive of the passions, according to Spinoza; but self-preservation alters its character when we realize that what is real and positive in us is what unites us to the whole, and not what preserves the appearance of separateness.

  The last two books of the Ethics, entitled respectively “Of human bondage, or the strength of the emotions” and “Of the power of the understanding, or of human freedom,” are the most interesting. We are in bondage in proportion as what happens to us is determined by outside causes, and we are free in proportion as we are self-determined. Spinoza, like Socrates and Plato, believes that all wrong action is due to intellectual error: the man who adequately understands his own circumstances will act wisely, and will even be happy in the face of what to another would be misfortune. He makes no appeal to unselfishness; he holds that self-seeking, in some sense, and more particularly self-preservation, govern all human behaviour. “No virtue can be conceived as prior to this endeavour to preserve one’s own being.” But his conception of what a wise man will choose as the goal of his self-seeking is different from that of the ordinary egoist: “The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s highest virtue is to know God.” Emotions are called “passions” when they spring from inadequate ideas; passions in different men may conflict, but men who live in obedience to reason will agree together. Pleasure in itself is good, but hope and fear are bad, and so are humility and repentance: “he who repents of an action is doubly wretched or infirm.” Spinoza regards time as unreal, and therefore all emotions which have to do essentially with an event as future or as past are contrary to reason. “In so far as the mind conceives a thing under the dictate of reason, it is affected equally, whether the idea be of a thing present, past, or future.”

  This is a hard saying, but it is of the essence of Spinoza’s system, and we shall do well to dwell upon it for a moment. In popular estimation, “all’s well that ends well”; if the universe is gradually improving, we think better of it than if it is gradually deteriorating, even if the sum of good and evil be the same in the two cases. We are more concerned about a disaster in our own time than in the time of Genghis Khan. According to Spinoza, this is irrational. Whatever happens is part of the eternal timeless world as God sees it; to Him, the date is irrelevant. The wise man, so far as human finitude allows, endeavours to see the world as God sees it, sub-specie æternitatis, under the aspect of eternity. But, you may retort, we are surely right in being more concerned about future misfortunes, which may possibly be averted, than about past calamities about which we can do nothing. To this argument Spinoza’s determinism supplies the answer. Only ignorance makes us think that we can alter the future; what will be will be, and the future is as unalterably fixed as the past. That is why hope and fear are condemned: both depend upon viewing the future as uncertain, and therefore spring from lack of wisdom.

  When we acquire, in so far as we can, a vision of the world which is analogous to God’s, we see everything as part of the whole, and as necessary to the goodness of the whole. Therefore “the knowledge of evil is an inadequate knowledge.” God has no knowledge of evil, because there is no evil to be known; the appearance of evil only arises through regarding parts of the universe as if they were self-subsistent.

  Spinoza’s outlook is intended to liberate men from the tyranny of fear. “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death, but of life.” Spinoza lived up to this precept very completely. On the last day of his life he was entirely calm, not exalted, like Socrates in the Phaedo, but conversing, as he would on any other day, about matters of interest to his interlocutor. Unlike some other philosophers, he not only believed his own doctrines, but practised them; I do not know of any occasion, in spite of great provocation, in which he was betrayed into the kind of heat or anger that his ethic condemned. In controversy he was courteous and reasonable, never denouncing, but doing his utmost to persuade.

  In so far as what happens to us springs from ourselves, it is good; only what comes from without is bad for us. “As all things whereof a man is the efficient cause are necessarily good, no evil can befall a man except through external causes.” Obviously, therefore, nothing bad can happen to the universe as a whole, since it is not subject to external causes. “We are a part of universal nature, and we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this, that part of our nature which is defined by intelligence, in other words the better part of ourselves, will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us, and in such acquiescence will endeavour to persist.” In so far as a man is an unwilling part of a larger whole, he is in bondage; but in so far as, through the understanding, he has grasped the sole reality of the whole, he is free. The implications of this doctrine are developed in the last Book of the Ethics.

  Spinoza does not, like the Stoics, object to all emotions; he objects only to those that are “passions,” i.e., those in which we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces. “An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” Understanding that all things are necessary helps the mind to acquire power over the emotions. “He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions, loves God, and so much the more as he more understands himself and his emotions.” This proposition introduces us to the “intellectual love of God,” in which wisdom consists. The intellectual love of God is a union of thought and emotion: it consists, I think one may say, in true thought combined with joy in the apprehension of truth. All joy in true thought is part of the intellectual love of God, for it contains nothing negative, and is therefore truly part of the whole, not only apparently, as are fragmentary things so separated in thought as to appear bad.

  I said a moment ago that the intellectual love of God involves joy, but perhaps this was a mistake, for Spinoza says that God is not affected by any emotion of pleasure or pain, and also says that “the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself.” I think, nevertheless, that there is something in “intellectual love” which is not mere intellect; perhaps the joy involved is considered as something superior to pleasure.

  “Love towards God,” we are told, “must hold the chief place in the mind.” I have omitted Spinoza’s demonstrations, but in so doing I have given an incomplete picture of his thought. As the proof of the above proposition is short, I will quote it in full; the reader can then in imagination supply proofs to other propositions. The proof of the above proposition is as follows:

  “For this love is associated with all the modifications of the body (V, 14) and is fostered by them all (V, 15); therefore (V, 11) it must hold the chief place in the mind. Q.E.D.”

  Of the propositions referred to in the above proof, V, 14 states: “The mind can bring it about, that all bodily modifications or images of things may be referred to the idea of God”; V, 15, quoted above, states: “He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much the more in proportion as he understands himself and his emotions”; V, 11 states: “In proportion as a mental image is referred to more objects, so is it more frequent, or more often vivid, and occupies the mind more.”

  The “proof” quoted above might be expressed as follows: Every increase in the understanding of what happens to us consists in referring events to the idea of God, since, in truth, everything is part of God. This understanding of everything as part of God is love of God. When all objects are referred to God, the idea of God will fully occupy the mind.

  Thus the statement that “love of God must hold the chief place in the mind” is not a primarily moral exhortation, but an account of what must inevitably happen as we acquire understanding.

  We are told that no one can hate God, but, on the other hand, “he who loves God cannot endeavour that God
should love him in return.” Goethe, who admired Spinoza without even beginning to understand him, thought this proposition an instance of self-abnegation. It is nothing of the sort, but a logical consequence of Spinoza’s metaphysic. He does not say that a man ought not to want God to love him; he says that a man who loves God cannot want God to love him. This is made plain by the proof, which says: “For, if a man shall so endeavour, he would desire (V, 17, Corol.) that God, whom he loves, should not be God, and consequently he would desire to feel pain (III, 19), which is absurd (III, 28).” V, 17 is the proposition already referred to, which says that God has no passions or pleasures or pains; the corollary referred to above deduces that God loves and hates no one. Here again what is involved is not an ethical precept, but a logical necessity: a man who loved God and wished God to love him would be wishing to feel pain, “which is absurd.”

  The statement that God can love no one should not be considered to contradict the statement that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love. He may love Himself, since that is possible without false belief ; and in any case intellectual love is a very special kind of love.

  At this point Spinoza tells us that he has now given us “all the remedies against the emotions.” The great remedy is clear and distinct ideas as to the nature of the emotions and their relation to external causes. There is a further advantage in love of God as compared to love of human beings: “Spiritual unhealthiness and misfortunes can generally be traced to excessive love of something which is subject to many variations.” But clear and distinct knowledge “begets a love towards a thing immutable and eternal,” and such love has not the turbulent and disquieting character of love for an object which is transient and changeable.