Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/145

Rh series of your propositions; then, if it happen that one of us cannot convince another, we think it worth while to make a note of the matter and write to you, in order that, if possible, it may be made clear to us; and that we may be able, with you for a leader, to defend truth against the superstitiously religious and the superstitiously Christian, and to resist the onslaught of the whole world.

During these years an active correspondence was kept up with Oldenburg. It is interesting to watch in it the working of forces that tend to dissolve the friendship between these so widely different minds, a friendship whose persistent triumph over all differences of opinion and of feeling is most encouraging. Spinoza is conscious of holding opinions which Oldenburg would consider to be at least "strange," and very likely "abominable;" but his friend has pressed him to communicate to him his thoughts on the weighty problems of philosophy and religion. So he writes that he will not refuse, for he holds "that friends should have all things in common, but most especially spiritual things." He adds, "I will endeavor to give you the explanation you ask for, though I think that, unless your kindness help, this step will not be a means of attaching you more strongly to me." He sends certain propositions of the "Ethica" which Oldenburg does not very well understand (this is in September, 1661); and the interest of the correspondence becomes transferred to the experiments of Robert Boyle, concerning whose book, "De Nitro," Spinoza writes with a minuteness that testifies to the interest that he took in chemistry, and shows that he was not by any means devoid of practical acquaintance with the subject. He is in correspondence too with his good friend and medical adviser Ludwig Meyer, an Amsterdam Jew.

Of his way of life at Rijnsburg and at Voorburg, details are wanting, but an idea may be formed of it from Colerus description of his way of life at the Hague.


 * It is almost incredible [says Colerus] how sober and economical he was during that time. We find [from accounts found amongst his papers] that he lived a whole day on a milk-soup prepared with butter, which came to three sous, and a jug of beer at one sou and a half; another day he ate nothing but gruel prepared with raisins and butter, and this dish cost him four sous and a half. In these accounts, mention is made of at most two half-pints of wine in a month; and although he was often invited to dine out, he preferred to live on what he could have at home to sitting at a sumptuous table at another's expense.

We should have gladly passed over this oft-told tale of the milk soup and the gruel — which after all does not prove much were it not that it is again necessary to vindicate Spinoza's character from the charge — one can hardly write the word seriously — of gluttony. In 1847, Professor Guhrauer published in the Zeitschrift für Geschichte, an account of the tradition concerning Spinoza that had been collected by one Gottlieb Stolle, a pupil of Christian Thomasius, during a voyage in Holland in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and written down by him in his "Memoirs." During his stay in Amsterdam in 1703, Stolle came to know "a certain old man," who had been personally acquainted with Spinoza. This old man stated that


 * In the beginning Spinoza lived very soberly, that is, so long as he had not much to spend; but as he became richer, he began to live better. From Amsterdam he went to Leyden, and thence afterwards to the Hague; and as he became acquainted with persons of distinction, he took to wearing a sword, dressing himself nicely, committed excesses in eating and drinking (he could take quite well a couple of cans of wine), and also —

But we must decline to attempt the translation of the very curious passage that follows; in short, the excesses he committed were such, "that he brought on consumption, of which he died." The reader who knows Spinoza, and has not the advantage of being acquainted with Stolle's old man, may be pardoned if he doubts the faithfulness of our quotation. He shall have the excerpt in the original; it is worth reading: —


 * Da er mit grossen Herrn bekannt geworden, (habe er) sich einen Degen angesteckt propre (sic) aufgeführet im Essen und Trinken Excesse gemacht (wie er denn ein Paar Kannen Wein gar leicht auf sich genommen), auch wohl ad virgo (sic!) gegangen, daher er sich endlich die Schwindsucht an dens Hals gezogen, und daran gestorben.

We have inserted, in the interest of grammar, a sic that appeared to be called for; as for the matter of the statements, we feel that marks of exclamation would be perfectly inadequate to the occasion. But let us look at the evidence. Firstly, Stolle's old man tells his story badly. To place the epoch of sensual indulgence at the end of a life whose whole course has been a chastening of the senses by moral suffering, by poverty, by intense thought, by the approaches of disease, is really