Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/49

 of God, therefore it becomes an argument for his actual being: according to Spinoza, God is himself contained in the world. Thus what, with Descartes, was only reason of knowledge, becomes, with Spinoza, reason of fact. If the former, in his Ontological Proof, taught that the existentia of God is a consequence of the essentia of God, the latter turns this into causa sui, and boldly opens his Ethics with: per causam sui intelligo id, cujus essentia (conception) involvit existentiam, remaining deaf to Aristotle's warning cry, τὸ δ' είναι ούκ ούσία ούδενί! Now, this is the most palpable confusion of reason and cause. And if Neo-Spinozans (Schellingites, Hegelians, &c.), with whom words are wont to pass for thoughts, often indulge in pompous, solemn admiration for this causa sui, for my own part I see nothing but a contradictio in adjecto in this same causa sui, a before that is after, an audacious command to us, to sever arbitrarily the eternal causal chain—something, in short, very like the proceeding of that Austrian, who finding himself unable to reach high enough to fasten the clasp on his tightly-strapped shako, got upon a chair. The right emblem for causa sui is Baron Münchhausen, sinking on horseback into the water, clinging by the legs to his horse and pulling both himself and the animal out by his own pigtail, with the motto underneath: Causa sui.

Let us finally cast a look at the 16th proposition of the 1st book of the Ethics. Here we find Spinoza concluding from the proposition, ex data cujuscunque rei definitione plures proprietates intellectus concludit, quce revera ex eadem necessario sequuntur, that ex necessitate divince natural (i.e., taken as a reality), infinita infinitis modis sequi debent: this God therefore unquestionably stands in the same relation to the world as a conception to its definition. The corollary, Deum omnium rerum esse, is nevertheless immediately connected with it. It is