Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/144

138 or that demonstrably false method of interpreting them was in all cases to be combated. Many are the forms under which belief may be operative on conduct; and truth, if it is to be believed, must be accommodated to the intelligence of the believer. If Spinoza had accepted the career offered him by the rabbins, and had placed a golden lock upon his lips, the act would but have taken rank with the too often forgotten fallings off of many another great leader lost. But he refused to palter, were it even but ever so little, with his conscience. Shaking off the dust from his feet, he set his face towards a life of poverty and of toil, made worthy and worth having by the consciousness of independence and integrity, and by the warmth of the great design that was brooding within him.

Out of the four years of struggle and anxiety, and so weighty development, that followed his secession from the synagogue, from 1656, namely, to 1660, hardly a detail of his life has come down to us. We gather that his position must have been a hard one, at all events a very trying one. He was penniless. Rienwertz says that he got his living by teaching (dass er Kinder informiret). The writer of the MS. life discovered by Müller states that he lived with the "Collegiant" friend above mentioned, "on the road between Amsterdam and Auwerkerke, until he moved with him to Rijnsburg, near Leiden."

Misfortune, it has been said, is the midwife that delivers genius of her children and in some way or other Spinoza found time for writing during these years. Though he published nothing, it is probable that he wrote a great deal. The "Theologico-Political Treatise" was written about this time; and during the same period the lately discovered "Tractus de Deo et Homine" — "Treatise on God and Man and his Welfare" — was probably entirely written. And if we take into account the composition of the "Apologia," we shall see that these were years of intense activity.

Spinoza was at Rijnsburg in 1661, as appears by a letter to him from Oldenburg, the secretary of the then lately-instituted Royal Society of England. Oldenburg refers to his visit to the philosopher at Rijnsburg; and to their "conversation about God, about extension and infinite thought, about the difference and agreement of their attributes, about the manner of the union of the human mind with the body; also about the principles of the Cartesian and Baconian philosophies." Colerus is therefore in error in saying that it was in 1664 that Spinoza moved to Rijnsburg — or Rhynsburg, as it is differently spelt. He there inhabited a very small house, "still standing" writes Van Vloten in 1862, "and easy to be known by its inscription, dating from 1667, from the pen of the poet Kamphuysen, —

an inscription that is curiously appropriate to the circumstances in which the philosopher found himself when an inhabitant of the house. It may be rendered, for the benefit of those unacquainted with the language, —

Spinoza had living with him during that time a certain young man whose identity is not quite clear, but whom there is great reason to believe to be that Albert Burgh who in 1675 became a convert to Catholicism, and wrote to the author of the "Ethica" a letter of some five-and-thirty pages, full of exhortation to "repent, to acknowledge his ignorance to be wisdom, and his wisdom madness; to be humbled from his pride, and be healed." The bear-leading of this youth was anything but a pleasant duty for the thinker; he complains bitterly of it in a letter to his friend Simon de Vries —


 * There is no one more annoying to me, nor none against whom I have to be more carefully on my guard, than he: wherefore I would have you and the others take heed not to communicate my opinions to him till he shall have attained a more mature age. He is too boyish yet and changeable, and greedy rather of novelty than of truth.

By "the others" is meant a certain circle of ardent friends who had gathered round the germ of the new doctrine, and were looking up in eager dependence to their leader. They had instituted a sort of club for the study in common of the new philosophy.


 * As for the course of study [writes Simon de Vries] we have thus ordered it. One of us (but each in turn) reads out to the rest, and explains according to his judgment, demonstrating everything according to the order and