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286 "If you turn all the events of the moment so quickly to your own interest, I congratulate the inhabitants of the good town of Bremen on their envoy."

"Never mind," said Spinoza; "he only wants to revenge himself for the white crow; he is not in earnest."

"At least I am in earnest in thinking that such examples taken from surrounding circumstances are the best warnings against vague speculations."

"So-called practical proofs easily take a somewhat angry or fanatical tone," answered Spinoza, laughing. "I only said spirit and body were inseparable and dependent on each other in so far that they can only be viewed as different manifestations of one and the same being; the spirit cannot be confined by the body nor the body by the spirit. Still no one has discovered what the body is capable of without the spirit, or by what means the spirit sets the body in motion. Indeed there is a considerable class of ideas to which we know indubitably certain qualities of body are needful. Speech and silence even, which we regard as prerogatives of the mind, and from which man deduces his absolute pre-eminence, prove nothing, for in sleep and delirium men speak without any voluntary effort, yet through the mind. Free thought, reaching far beyond our mere bodily sphere, always