Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/460

444 (1) There always will be more or less dissatisfaction with an editor's selections, but I think there is real ground for saying that Professor Fullerton has not been altogether judicious in the exercise of his editorial privilege. The extracts are entirely from the Ethics. Now the Ethics, no doubt, contains the system of Spinoza in its final form, but from the fact that Spinoza chose to set it forth ordine geometrico, it has the delusive air of being a piece of elaborate dogmatism built up from unproved definitions and from very questionable axioms and postulates. Hence the modern student who starts with the Ethics gets a false impression of Spinoza, and indeed he finds it almost impossible to enter with sympathy and intelligence into his way of thinking. He is told that Spinoza is a great thinker, but he cannot understand the process by which this great thinker has reached his results. The very first sentence he meets is an enigma. Per causam sui (he reads) intelligo id cujus essentia involvit existentiam. " Now what," he says to himself, "is this causa sui? what is the essentia of a causa sui? and why of this essentia is it said that it involvit existentiam?" I have supposed our student to be able to read Spinoza in the original; but if he belongs to the class for whom this book is intended, he will have to be content with Mr. Fullerton's translation: "By cause of itself I mean that the essence of which involves existence." If he makes any sense of this, he is not the man I take him for. But even if he had been dealt with more kindly, and there had been presented for his consideration some such words as these: "I call a thing self-caused when it is of such a nature that it cannot but exist," even then he would have his difficulties. The truth is, I believe, that the man who starts with the Ethics will find it almost impossible to make any headway. But why should he start with the Ethics? In the De Intellectus Emendatione Spinoza has given us a sort of autobiography of his spiritual development, in which he tries to explain how he raised himself from the limited point of view of ordinary thought to the wider vision of philosophy. Here, therefore, is the fit, and almost indispensable, introduction to Spinoza. The De Intellectus Emendatione ought, in my opinion, to have been given in full, as also the first thirteen propositions of Part III of the Ethics, together with the whole, or at least the first thirty-eight propositions of Part IV.

(2) It is impossible to speak highly of Mr. Fullerton's translations. In a work designed for the use of students, and meant to be self-interpreting, there ought to be nothing in the form to distract the reader's attention from the thought. Not only should the original be rendered accurately, but it should be done into idiomatic English. The translator, in other words, should be so saturated with the ideas of his author that his work shall seem to have issued straight from the mint of his own