Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/146

140 clumsy. Secondly, all the other witnesses agree that Spinoza's life was one of perfect temperance. Rienwertz, his friend, the publisher of his works, told Stolle, that "he had always lived very moderately and been contented with little. He had never had any inclination to marriage, yet never blamed those who marry." We think of certain propositions of the "Ethica," and notwithstanding Stolle's old man, involuntarily we think of St. Paul. Stolle visited Bayle, the celebrated author of the dictionary, at Amsterdam, and Bayle told him that


 * as regards Spinoza's morals, he lived soberly at the Hague, without furniture, or feasting, or show (er habe im Haag mässig gelebt, und von Hausrath, Saufen, und Pracht nichts gehatten).

Lucas writes that


 * he was so temperate and so sober that the smallest means sufficed for his wants. He did not spend six sous a day, on an average, and did not drink more than a pint of wine in a month. "Nature is satisfied with little," he used to say, "and when she is content, I am so too."

The evidence of Colerus has been given above. It should be borne in mind that this writer is the chief and by far the most weighty authority for the facts of Spinoza's life; and his testimony to the purity of Spinoza's morals is by so much the more valuable as good Colerus was animated by a most vehement hatred and terror of the philosopher's teaching. He speaks of him, when examining his writings, as "this miserable man," and as "this celebrated atheist." He is satirical concerning the terms of the bill sent in after Spinoza's death by his barber, who was so ill-advised as to speak of him in that document as "M. Spinoza de bien-heureuse mémoire." The undertaker, two taillandiers, and a mercer, having paid the deceased the same compliment, Colerus devotes a grave paragraph to animadversion on the propriety of the term "bien-heureuse." He ends a paragraph on the "Theologico-Political Treatise" with the apostrophe, "Le seigneur te confonde, Satan, et te ferme la bouche!" He asserts that that work is "full of nothing but lies and blasphemies," and of the doctrine of the "Ethica," he asks, whether it be not "the most pernicious atheism that has ever been seen in the world." Such an attitude of mind must infallibly have inclined him to render to the philosopher's moral character no more than the strictest measure of justice it is incredible that he should have passed over without due distillation the malicious stories that were current concerning the "reprobate" freethinker, and any confirmation of them must have destroyed the admiration that he evidently felt for his character. And Colerus informants were capable witnesses one of them, Van der Spyck, was an artist, and, judging from his eloquent portrait of Spinoza, by no means a bad artist; he must be considered to be a competent witness to the habits of the man who for more than six years lived in friendly intercourse with him under his own roof. For those who know Spinoza from his writings, such evidence must be superfluous; it is impossible to have the "Ethica" tolerably present to one's mind, and to believe the writer capable of low sensuality.

The instruction of Albert Burgh, or other unknown pupil, seems not to have furnished him with a sufficient income and it was probably shortly after his excommunication that he set himself to work at a trade by which he could live. Colerus states that he "set himself to learn" the construction of lenses for telescopes and for other optical uses. It is probable that he had learned the art long before. It is well known that the Hebrew law ordained that all, even those destined to the study of the law, should learn some handiwork or other, by which in time of need they might subsist. The exiled thinker, looking somewhat blankly around him for a plan of life, was reminded of this perhaps once-despised handicraft. It offered him, at least, "independence, the first of earthly blessings; " and he gallantly cast in his lot with plain living and high thinking. He succeeded so well in his lens-grinding, we are told by Colerus, that


 * he was applied to from all sides for his glasses, the sale of which furnished enough to suffice for his wants. When the lenses were finished, his friends used to send and fetch them, sell them, and remit him the money that they brought in;

a practice which demonstrates in a most significant and even touching manner these friends' sense of the fitness of relieving a philosopher from sublunary cares.


 * Most of his time he passed in his room. When tired of his meditations, he used in order to refresh himself, to come down-stairs and talk to the people of the house on any matter that would serve for conversation, even on trifles. Sometimes he would enjoy a pipe of tobacco; or, when he wished for longer relaxation, he would set spiders to fight with one another, or would throw flies into the