Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/446

424 The last notes had not died away when Spinoza took his hat and departed. Olympia rose and closed the keyboard of the organ so that the pipes rattled together. With overflowing heart, thus in need of the sympathy of others, Spinoza had come to Olympia. There are times when those to whom temples of stone are closed must worship in the temple of a faithful human heart.

The fate of Spinoza had thus directed him to seek happiness in himself alone.

He might well have consoled himself in that there was now no necessity for him to bow the mind trained to truth alone to any form accepted by others, and be taught by daily labor and daily care to silence and conceal his convictions. He might well have comforted himself in that a love was annihilated with which he had so often struggled painfully; but it is ever an enigma of love that it longs for lost pain, lost desire. Bitterness and depression sought to seize on him, but in self-controlled wisdom he learned to impart to his mind ever more steadfastly that peace of mind which is freedom of mind, in that it submits to the necessity of events, and follows their laws as if the heart itself had no concern in them. That abandonment to a grief whose painful effects can be conquered by reason is partial suicide. He who would be free, that is, would live according to the laws of reason, must never cease to be; and he permits this, his