Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/156

132 which Spinoza often praised him. Sometimes he even went to hear him preach, and attached great value to the learned manner in which he explained the Scriptures, and his solid applications of their doctrine. He used to exhort his hostess and the people of the house never to miss any of the sermons of so gifted a man."

Once more he suffered a hard rub from contact with the world. Correspondence with Oldenburg had been interrupted for nearly ten years, when, in the early months of 1675, Spinoza sent his old friend a letter and a copy of the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus." On the 5th July, 1675, he wrote to Oldenburg that he was about to publish the "Ethica," and at the end of the month he set out for Amsterdam to arrange for the publication of the book.


 * Whilst I was so engaged [he writes] a rumor was being spread everywhere that there was a certain book of mine under the press, and that I endeavored to show in it that there is no God, which rumor was believed by many. Whence certain theologians (very likely themselves the authors of the rumor) took occasion to denounce me before the magistracy; and certain stolid Cartesians, who are believed to hold my views, began to go about, and are still going about, uttering abuse of my writings and opinions, in order to clear themselves of that suspicion.

This state of things became day by day worse, and the publication of the book was suspended. It is probable that on reflection he decided that the book should be withheld until after his death, promising himself that he would devote the remaining years of his life to the elaboration of the subordinate members of his system of thought. Such works were begun by him, and their remains make us regret that their author did not live to complete them. One of them, the "De Intellectus Emendatione," probably one of his earliest works, is a noble fragment, every way worthy to stand beside the "Ethica." It appears to have been at this time that he made those excursions into the domain of natural history of which Colerus makes mention. "He used to observe with the microscope the parts of the smallest insects, whence he used afterwards to draw the inferences that seemed best to accord with his discoveries." This may point to biological studies undertaken in the interest of an unwritten book, in which the laws of life were to be exposed. We are unfortunately unable to say whether he was stimulated to these researches by a knowledge of the splendidly persevering and acute observation of his contemporary and countryman Leeuwenhoek, the father of modern microscopic anatomy.

We can well believe that Spinoza's health was never robust — that he was delicate, unhealthy, emaciated. Colerus adds that he had suffered from phthisis for more than twenty years before his death, and other authors have repeated his statement. It is, however, difficult to believe that such arduous work as that accomplished by Spinoza was performed in the teeth of such an enervating disease as pulmonary consumption. The last twenty years of his life, it should be remembered, cover just the latter half of it from his excommunication, namely, in 1656, to his death early in 1677; that is to say, they include the whole period of his labours as an author. To the labor, assuredly immense, of the composition of such works as the "Ethica," we have to add that of the trade by which he gained his daily bread. Phthisis is a disease of a peculiarly enervating nature, peculiarly destructive of the courage necessary to support such long and arduous work. Is it not more reasonable to suppose that, always of a phthisical diathesis, Spinoza brought on an attack of consumption by undue abandonment to his sedentary mode of life? "He would sometimes pass three months without leaving the house." By such a mode of life disease must have been brought on.

Spinoza escaped a lingering illness, and on the afternoon of the 21st of February, 1677, placidly breathed his last. The tongue of slander was not silenced by the presence of death. The imaginations of the seventeenth century could not help dressing out the "deathbeds of infidels" with the blackest colors and the most horribly fantastic incidents. We do not know whether the profession of pantheism in particular was supposed to be visited with "horrible deaths brought on by special diseases;" but our great writer's epigram loses all appearance of caricature when we compare it with the rumors that were current on the occasion of Spinoza's death. The author of "Menagiana," a book published in Amsterdam in 1695, asserts that he died in France, from fear of being put into the Bastille. Other stories relate the precautions taken by him during his illness, in order to avoid visitors "the sight of whom would importune him "(that is, we imagine, as the sight of the blessed forms one of the torments of the damned). One account states that he was heard frequently to pronounce the name of God during his illness, with a