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In short, Leibniz differs from Spinoza in this, that he looks upon the universal mechanism as an aspect which reality takes for us, whereas, Spinoza makes of it an aspect which reality takes for itself. It is true that, after having concentrated in God the whole of the real, it became difficult for them to pass from God to things, from eternity to time.
Mozley meets Spinoza's objection to the unmeaning isolation of a miracle by insisting on the distinction, which Spinoza failed to see, between a miracle simply as a wonder for its own sake, and as a means, deriving its use and its value simply from the end which it was to serve.
It seems Spinoza was betrayed into overt indiscretion by two fellow-students from the Synagogue, who asked for his opinion regarding the existence of angels, the corporeality of God and the immortality of the soul. Spinoza's answers were not complete, but incomplete as they were, they yet revealed a mind that was, to the faithful, shockingly astray from the orthodox path.
All his free time and energy Spinoza dedicated with unusual single-hearted devotion to the disinterested development of a philosophy he knew would not be very acceptable to the general or even special philosophic reader. His mode of life is all the more remarkable because it was not determined by embittered misanthropy or passionate abhorrence of the goods of the world.
"Hast thou Stoupe's Religion des Hollandois?" he asked, with a sudden thought. "Inquire elsewhere," snapped the bookseller surlily. "Et tu, Brute!" said Spinoza, smiling. "Dost thou also join the hue and cry? Methinks heresy should nourish thy trade. A wilderness of counterblasts, treatises, tractlets, pasquinades the more the merrier, eh?" The bookseller stared.
And so a whole host of Pantheistic Spiritualists will indignantly disclaim the imputation of Atheism, and even attempt to vindicate Spinoza himself from the odious charge. Nay, some of the grossest Materialists, such as Atkinson and Martineau, while they explicitly deny the existence of a living personal God, will affirm that Pantheism is not Atheism.
It is a consequence of that very essence of being, which according to Spinoza consists in the effort to persist indefinitely in its own being. Speaking in terms in which concreteness verges upon grossness, it may be said that the brain, in so far as its function is concerned, depends upon the stomach.
But now it has come about after all, and I would not contradict you if you said that it was Rembrandt and Spinoza who drew me to the regions sanctified by their labors for the fulfilment of my life's task, had not this meditative dwelling sphere been already dear to me for other reasons.
Has the great metaphysician forgotten, that there may be such things as men and angels in the universe; or does he mean, with Spinoza, to blot out all created agents, and all subordinate agency, from existence? If not, then certainly God may refuse to be the author of sin, without leaving it to blind chance, which is incapable of such a thing.
Certain things are pronounced by Ward to be impossible even for Omnipotence as, for example, to make a trilateral figure which shall not be also triangular. Carry out this view, says Fitzjames, and you make our conceptions the measure of reality. Mysteries, therefore, become nonsense, and miracles an impossibility. In fact, Ward's logic would lead to Spinoza, not to the deity of Catholic belief.
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