THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA General Account.—The pioneers of modern thought were inspired by a revulsion from the mediaeval reliance on authority, and the subordination of reason to it. The Humanists of the Renaissance attempted to vindicate the autonomy of reason as against the authority of books and institutions. This rationalist spirit affected some of the Jews of Amsterdam, and, as already remarked, brought them into conflict with established authority. It was the same spirit that brought about the crisis in the early life of Spinoza, who eventually became the prince of rationalists. He insisted that even the Scriptures must be submitted to the test of reason, and produced the most effective protest against the subordination of reason to their authority. This revolt against mere authoritarianism, however, only represented the negative side of rationalism. Important as this was, it was only preparatory to its positive aspect. The positive side of rationalism may be seen in the great classics of science in the 16th and 17th cen turies—the works of Copernicus, Vesalius, Galileo, Gilbert, Kepler, Harvey, Boyle, Descartes, Huygens, Pascal, Leibniz and Newton, to mention only a round dozen of the most famous names of the period. Their discoveries were the positive results of reason, whose main function it is to trace the connections between things, to discover their laws, and to display the order which makes things intelligible. It may be said, without any disrespect for these famous men, that the positive side of ration alism also found its fullest expression in Spinoza. For he at tempted a synthesis of the whole of reality. This attempt shocked some of the above-mentioned geniuses, and would have shocked the rest, had they heard of it. For none of them dreamed of the possibility of bridging the chasm between the natural and the supernatural. Spinoza conceived of the whole of reality, including the human and the divine, as an organically intercon nected cosmos, in which there is nothing capricious or contingent, but everything happens in an orderly manner according to law.
Spinoza arrived at his conception partly as follows. Whatever object or event be considered, it can only be explained by ref er ence to innumerable others which condition it. Each of these is,
in turn, dependent on innumerable others. Each finite thing seems to send out innumerable tendrils and derive support from all directions. Is it conceivable that reality should be composed entirely of such conditional, dependent things? Spinoza, like others, said No. There must be some self-existing, independent or absolute Being as the ground of all that is dependent. But what is the relation of this absolute Being to the world of dependent things and events? The common answer is that this absolute Being is God, an omnipotent supernatural Being who created the world out of nothing, maintains its existence, and occasionally interferes with it in miraculous ways. This conception was almost universal at that time. Newton subscribed to it. And Descartes made a special entry in his diary to record his belief in the three miracles, namely, the creation out of nothing, free-will, and the God-man. But Spinoza rejected the idea of an external Creator suddenly, and apparently capriciously, creating the world at one particular time rather than another, and creating it out of nothing. The solution appeared to him more perplexing than the problem, and rather unscientific in spirit as involving a break in continuity. He preferred to think of the entire system of reality as its own ground. This view was simpler; it avoided the im possible conception of creation out of nothing ; and was religiously more satisfying by bringing God and man into closer relationship. Instead of Nature, on the one hand, and a supernatural God, on the other, he posited one world of reality, at once Nature and God, and leaving no room for the supernatural. This so called Naturalism of Spinoza is only distorted if one starts with a crude materialistic idea of Nature and supposes that Spinoza degraded God. The truth is that he raised Nature to the rank of God by conceiving Nature as the fulness of reality, as the One and All. He rejected the specious simplicity obtainable by denying the reality of Matter, or of Mind, or of God. The cosmic system comprehends them all. In fact, God and Nature become identical when each is conceived as the Perfect Self-Existent. This consti tutes Spinoza's Pantheism.