Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/168

156 made up of parts. So far as they exist, they must be con ceived as parts of the divine substance, but when we look directly at that divine substance, their separate existence altogether disappears. It has, however, been already mentioned that this ascending movement of abstraction, does uot at once and directly bring Spinoza to the absolute unity of substance. The principle that &quot; determination is negation,&quot; and that therefore the absolute reality is to be found only in the indeterminate, would lead us to expect this conclusion ; but the Cartesian dualism prevents Spinoza from reaching it. Mind and matter are so absolutely opposed, that even when we take away all limit and determination from both, they still retain their distinctness. liaised to infinity, they still refuse to be identified. We are forced, indeed, to take from them their substantial or substantive existence, for there can be no other substance but God, who includes all reality in himself. But though reduced to attributes of a common substance, the difference of thought and ex tension is insoluble. The independence of individual finite things disappears whenever we substitute thought for imagination, but even to pure intelligence, extension re mains extension, and thought remains thought. Spinoza seems therefore reduced to a dilemma ; he cannot surrender either the unity or the duality of things, yet he cannot relate them to each other. The only course left open to him is to conceive each attribute in its turn as the whole substance, and to regard their difference as the difference of expression As the patriarch was called by the two names of Jacob and Israol, under different aspects, each of which included the whole reality of the man, so our minds appre hend the absolute substance in two ways, each of which expresses its whole nature. In this way the extremes of absolute identity and absolute difference seem to be recon ciled. There is a complete parallelism of thought and extension, or do et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexio rerum, yet there is also a complete independence and absence of relation between them, for each is the whole. A thing in one expression cannot bo related to itself in another expression. Hence in so far as we look at the substance under the attribute of thought, we must take no account of extension, and in so far as we look at it under the attribute of extension, we must equally refuse to taks any account of thought. This parallelism may be best illustrated by Spinoza s account of the relation of the human soul and body. The soul is the idea of the body, and the body is the object of the soul, whatever is in the one really is in the other ideally ; yet this relation of object and subject does not imply any connexion The motions and changes of the body have to be accounted for partly by itself, partly by the influence of other bodies ; and the thoughts of the soul in like manner have to be accounted for partly by what God thinks as constituting the individual mind, and partly by what he thinks as constituting the minds of other individuals. But to account for thought by the motions of the body, or for the motions of the body by thought, is to attempt to bridge the impassable gulf between thought and extension. It involves the double ab surdity of accounting for a thing by itself, and of accounting for it by that which has nothing in common with it. Tn one point of view, this theory of Spinoza deserves the highest praise for that very characteristic which pro bably excited most odium against it at the time it was first published, namely, its exaltation of matter. It is the mark of an imperfect spiritualism to hide its eyes from outward nature, and to shrink from the material as impure and defiling. But its horror and fear are proofs of weak ness ; it flies from an enemy it cannot overcome. Spinoza s bold identification of spirit and matter, God and nature, contains in it the germ of a higher idealism than can be found in any philosophy that asserts the claims of the former at the expense of the latter. A system that begins by making nature godless, will inevitably end, as Schelling once said, in making God unnatural. The expedients by which Des Cartes keeps matter at a distance from God, were intended to maintain his pure spirituality; but their ultimate effect was seen in his reduction of the spiritual nature to mere will. As Christianity has its superiority over other religions in this, that it does not end with the opposition of the human to the divine, the natural to the spiritual, but ultimately reconciles them, so a true idealism must vindicate its claims by absorbing materialism into itself. It was therefore a true instinct of philosophy that led Spinoza to raise matter to the co-equal of spirit, and at the same time to protest against the Cartesian conception of matter as mere inert mass, moved only by impulse from without. &quot; What were a God that only impelled the world from without? &quot; says Goethe. &quot; It becomes him to stir it by an inward energy, to involve nature in himself, himself in nature, so that that which lives and moves and has a being in him can never feel the want of his power or his spirit.&quot; While, however, Spinoza thus escapes some of the inconsequences of Des Cartes, the contradiction that was implicit in ths Cartesian system between the duality and the unity, the attributes and the substance, in his system becomes explicit. When so great emphasis is laid upon the unity of substance, it becomes more difficult to explain the difference of the attributes. The result is, that Spinoza is forced to account for it, not by the nature of substance itself, but by the nature of the intelligence to which it is revealed. &quot; By substance,&quot; he says, &quot; I under stand that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself. By attribute I understand the same thing, nisi quod attributum dicatur respectii intellectus substantice cerium talem naturam tribuentis.&quot; Hence we are naturally led with Erdmann to think of the intelligence dividing the substance as a kind of prism that breaks the white light into different .colours, through each of which the same world is seen, only with a different aspect. But if the intelligence in itself is but a mode of one of the attributes, how can it be itself the source of their distinction ? The key to this difficulty is that Spinoza has really, and almost in spite of his logical principles, two opposite concep tions of substance, between which he alternates without ever bringing them to a unity. On the one hand, in accordance with the principle that determination is negation, substance must be taken as that which is utterly indeterminate, like the Absolute of the Buddhist, which we can characterize only by denying of it everything that we assert of the finite. In this view, no predicate can be applied univocally to God and to the creatures; he differs from them, not only in existence, but in essence. If we follow out this view to its legitimate result, God is withdrawn into his own absolute unity, and uo difference of attributes can be ascribed to him, except in respect of something else than himself. It is owing to the defects of our intelligence that he appears under different forms or expressions; in himself he is pure being, without form or expression at all. But, on the other hand, it is to be observed, that while Spinoza really proceeds by abstraction and negation,, he does not mean to do so. The abstract is to him the unreal and imaginary, and what he means by substance is not simply Being in general, the conception that remains when we omit all that distinguishes the particulars, but the absolute totality of things conceived as a unity in which all particular existence is included and subordinated.