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All Spinoza's teaching with regard to the passions is a consequence of what he believes of God and man. He will study the passions and not curse them. He finds that by understanding them "we can bring it to pass that we suffer less from them. The direct influence of Spinoza's theology is also shown in his treatment of pity, hatred, laughter, and contempt.
Van den Ende was also something of a political adventurer; he finally paid the unsuccessful conspirator's price on the gallows in Paris. It is not at all unlikely that Spinoza's hard-headed political and ethical realism was, in significant measure, due to his early intimacy with his variously gifted and interesting Latin master.
But if any one thinks that the sacred word "gospel" is here misused, and that such teaching is fatal to piety, let him turn to the 104th Psalm and read, from Spinoza's point of view, the cosmic vision of the Hebrew seer.
God is All-in-all; but He is definite and individual, the omnipresent and omniscient Mind; and man's individuality is God's own image and likeness, even the immeasurable idea of divine Mind. In the Science of good, evil loses all place, person, and power. According to Spinoza's philosophy God is amplification. He is in all things, and therefore He is in evil in human thought.
After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of "Spinoza's Improvement of the Understanding."
Little or nothing would need to be changed in his system if the Life of Reason, in its higher ranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is not necessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep and generosity in Spinoza's practical ideals. For moral philosophy we are driven back, then, upon the ancients; but not, of course, for moral inspiration.
Man in such a system could no more pine to be God than he could pine to be the law of gravity, or Spinoza's substance, or Hegel's dialectical idea. Such naturalistic abstractions, while they perhaps express some element of reality or its total form, are not objects corresponding to man's purposes and are morally inferior to his humanity.
"Mayor" Purvis alone seemed unmoved. "What's that book he's got open in front of him?" he asked. "May I see?" interposed Challis hurriedly, and he rose from his chair, picked up the book in question, glanced at it for a moment, and then handed it to the grocer. The book was Van Vloten's Dutch text and Latin translation of Spinoza's Short Treatise. The grocer turned to the title-page.
It concerned the estate of the deceased medical student, Simon De Vries, a devoted disciple, who knowing himself doomed to die young, would have made the Master his heir, had not Spinoza, by consenting to a small annual subsidy, persuaded him to leave his property to his brother. The grateful heir now proposed to increase Spinoza's allowance to five hundred florins.
And that satisfaction no son of Adam could possibly make. This conception of Divine justice, not as a sentence of a judge, but as the action of an eternal law, is identical with Spinoza's. That every act involves consequences which cannot be separated from it, and may continue operative to eternity, is a philosophical position which is now generally admitted.
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