Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/165

] analoyia universi, which raises the individual life, and even the present moment of the individual life, with its passing feelings, into the standard for measuring the universe, this, in the eyes of Spinoza, is the source of all error and evil to man. On the other hand, his highest good is to live the universal life of reason, or what is the same thing, to view ail things from their centre in God, and to be moved only by the passion for good in general, &quot; the intellectual love of God.&quot; In the treatise De Emendatione Intellectus, Spinoza takes up this contrast in the first instance from its moral side. &quot; All our felicity or infelicity is founded on the nature of the object to which we are joined by love.&quot; To love the things that perish is to be in continual trouble and disturbance of passion ; it is to be full of envy and hatred towards others who possess them ; it is to be ever striving after that which, when we attain it, does not satisfy us ; or lamenting over the loss of that which inevitably passes away from us ; only &quot; love to an object that is infinite and eternal feeds the soul with a changeless and unmingled joy.&quot; But again our love rests upon our knowledge if we saw things as they really are we should love only the highest object. It is because sense and imagination give to the finite an independence aud substantiality that do not belong to it, that we waste our love upon it as if it were infinite. And as the first step towards truth is to understand our error, so Spinoza proceeds to explain the defects of common sense, or in other words, of that first and unreflected view of the world, which he, like Plato, calls opinion. Opinion is a kind of knowledge derived partly from hearsay, and partly from experientia vaga. It consists of vague and general concep tions of things, got either from the report of others or from an experience which has not received any special direction from intelligence. The mind that has not got beyond the stage of opinion takes things as they present themselves in its individual experience ; and its beliefs grow up by association of whatever happens to have been found to gether in that experience. And as the combining principle of the elements of opinion is individual and not universal, so its conception of the world is at once fragmentary and accidental. It does not see things in their connection with the unity of the whole, and hence it cannot see them in their true relation to each other. &quot; I assert expressly,&quot; says Spinoza, &quot;that the mind has no adequate conception either of itself or of external things, but only a confused knowledge of them, so long as it perceives them only in the common order of nature, i.e., so long as it is externally determined to contemplate this or that object by the accidental concourse of things, and so long as it is not internally determined by the unity of thought in which it considers a number of things to understand their agree ments, differences, and contradictions.&quot; There are two kinds of errors which are usually sup posed to exclude each other, but which Spinoza finds to be united in opinion. These are the errors of abstraction and imagination ; the former explains its vice by defect, the latter its vice by excess. On the one hand, opinion is abstract and one-sided ; it is defective in knowledge and takes hold of things only at one point. On the other hand, and just because of this abstractness and one-sidedness, it is forced to give an artificial completeness and inde pendence to that which is essentially fragmentary and dependent. The word abstract is misleading, in so far as we are wont to associate with abstraction the idea of a mental effort by which parts are separated from a given whole ; but it may be applied without violence to any imperfect conception, iu which things that are really elements of a greater whole are treated as if they were res complete?, independent objects, complete in themselves. And in this sense the ordinary consciousness of man is often the victim of abstractions when it supposes itself most of all to be dealing with realities. The essences and substances of the schoolman may delude him, but he cannot think these notions clearly without seeing that they are only abstract elements of reality, and that they have a meaning only in relation to the other elements of it. But common sense remains unconscious of its abstractness because imagination gives a kind of substantiality to the fragmentary and limited, and so makes it possible to con ceive it as an independent reality. Pure intelligence seeing the part as it is in itself could never see it but as a part. Thought, when it rises to clearness and distinctness in regard to any finite object, must at once discern its relation to other finite objects and to the whole, must discern, in Spinozistic language, that it is &quot;modal&quot; and not &quot;real.&quot; But though it is not possible to think the part as a whcle it is possible to picture it as a whole. The limited image that fills the mind s eye seems to need nothing else for its reality. &quot;VTe cannot think a house clearly and distinctly in all the connection of its parts with each other, without seeing its necessary relation to the earth on which it stands, to the pressure of the atmosphere, &c. The very circum stances by which the possibility of such an existence is explained make it impossible to conceive it apart from other things. But nothing hinders me to rest on a house as a complete picture by itself. Imagination represents things in the externality of space and time, aud is subjected to no other conditions but those of space and time. Hence it can begin anywhere, and stop anywhere. For the same cause it can mingle and confuse together all manner of inconsistent forms can imagine a man with a horse s head, a candle blazing in vacuo, a speaking tree, a man changed into an animal. There may be elements in the nature of these things that would prevent such combinations; but these elements are not necessarily present to the ordinary consciousness, the abstractness of whose conceptions leaves it absolutely at the mercy of imagination or accidental association. To thought in this stage anything is possible that can be pictured. On the other hand, as knowledge advances, this freedom of combination becomes limited, &quot; the less the mind understands and the more it perceives, the greater is its power of fiction, and the more it under stands, the narrower is the limitation of that power. For just as in the moment of consciousness we cannot imagine that we do not think, so after we have apprehended the nature of body, we cannot conceive of a fly of infinite size, and after we know the nature of a soul we cannot think of it as a square, though we may use the words that express these ideas.&quot; Thus, according to Spinoza, the range of possibility narrows as knowledge widens, until to perfected knowledge possibility is lost in necessity. From these considerations, it follows that all thought is imperfect that stops short of the absolute unity of all things. Our first imperfect notion of things as isolated from each other, or connected only by co-existence and succession, is a mere imagination of things. It is a fictitious substantiation of isolated moments in the eternal Being. Knowledge, so far as it deals with the finite, is engaged in a continual process of self-correction which can never be completed, for at every step there is an element of falsity, in so far as the mind rests in the contemplation of a certain number of the elements of the world, as if they constituted a complete whole by themselves, whereas they are only a part, the conception of which has to be modified at the next step of considering its relation to the other parts. Thus we rise from individuals of the first to individuals of 