Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/219

Rh bodies. The authors draw more fully the logical consequences of this doctrine and show how completely it is in harmony with the present scientific standpoint.

It is difficult, however, to agree with the authors' assertion that by ratio Spinoza understands knowledge of the natural sciences. He describes this knowledge as, "arising from the fact that we have notions common to all men, and adequate ideas of the properties of things." The authors appear to me to prove conclusively that Spinoza meant by these notiones communes, "the axioms of mathematics and the fundamental conceptions of the sciences" (p. 46). It is not so clear that the method of which Spinoza thought is "that of experiment and exact investigation of things." The example which he himself gives of rational knowledge, of deducing the rule for finding the fourth proportional from a knowledge of the theory, shows clearly that he was not thinking of induction. The passage upon which the authors base their interpretation is the note to ii, 29 of the Ethics. The mind, says Spinoza, has no adequate knowledge when it is determined from without, by the chance play of circumstances to regard this or that; but it has a clear and distinct knowledge when it is determined from within, i.e. by the fact of regarding several things at once to understand their points of agreement, difference, and contrast. The authors assert that this is exactly the method of the natural science which by observation and experiment strive to discover the resemblances and differences of bodies.

It does not seem to me that any such inference is warranted by the passage. The contrast is between determination from without and determination from within, or, as the authors themselves put it, between receptivity and spontaneity. There is no doubt that Spinoza, in common with the other thinkers of his time, regarded mathematical knowledge as the type of rational knowledge. Numerous passages might be quoted, both from the Ethics and from his correspondence, to show that he conceived it to be the task of reason to deduce from the "notions common to all men" the properties of things, in full confidence that "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things."

The artistic way of regarding things is, according to the authors, the method of the third kind of knowledge, which Spinoza names intuition. By means of this power, whether manifested in art, in the drama, or through scientific insight, the mind grasps at once the true character, the eternal essence, of things. Intuition is a knowledge, too, of the essence of individual things, while reason deals only with universals (V, xxxv, note). Wherein, then, does the essence of individual things consist? In Part III, vi-ix, Spinoza tells us that the essence of each thing