Chapter 2

A couple of gulls rise from the base of the cliffs to a height of about a hundred feet above them. They turn their heads to the south-west, and hover like hawks, but without any visible movement of their wings. They are followed by two more, who also poise themselves in the same way. Presently all four mount higher, and again face the tempest. They do not appear to defy it, nor even to exert themselves in resisting it. What to us below is fierce opposition is to them a support and delight. How these wonderful birds are able to accomplish this feat no mathematician can tell us. After remaining stationary a few minutes, they wheel round, once more ascend, and then without any effort go off to sea directly in the teeth of the hurricane.

NOVEMBER

A NOVEMBER day at the end of the month—the country is left to those who live in it. The scattered visitors who took lodgings in the summer in the villages have all departed, and the recollection that they have been here makes the solitude more complete. The woods in which they wandered are impassable, for the rain has been heavy, and the dry, baked clay of August has been turned into a slough a foot deep. The wind, what there is of it, is from the south-west, soft, sweet and damp; the sky is almost covered with bluish-grey clouds, which here and there give way and permit a dim, watery gleam to float slowly over the distant pastures. The grass for the most part is greyish-green, more grey than green where it has not been mown, but on the rocky and broken ground there is a colour like that of an emerald, and the low sun when it comes out throws from the projections on the hillside long and beautifully shaped shadows. Multitudes of gnats in these brief moments of sunshine are seen playing in it. The leaves have not all fallen, down in the hollow hardly any have gone, and the trees are still bossy, tinted with the delicate yellowish-brown and brown of different stages of decay. The hedges have been washed clean of the white dust; the roads have been washed; a deep drain has just begun to trickle and on the meadows lie little pools of the clearest rainwater, reflecting with added loveliness any blue patch of the heavens disclosed above them. The birds are silent save the jackdaws and the robin, who still sings his recollections of the summer, or his anticipations of the spring, or perhaps his pleasure in the late autumn. The finches are in flocks, and whirl round in the air with graceful, shell-like convolutions as they descend, part separating, for no reason apparently, and forming a second flock which goes away over the copse. There is hardly any farm-work going on, excepting in the ditches, which are being cleaned in readiness for the overflow when the thirsty ground shall have sucked its fill. Under a bank by the roadside a couple of men employed in carting stone for road-mending are sitting on a sack eating their dinner. The roof of the barn beyond them is brilliant with moss and lichens; it has not been so vivid since last February. It is a delightful time. No demand is made for ecstatic admiration; everything is at rest, nature has nothing to do but to sleep and wait.

THE BREAK-UP OF A GREAT DROUGHT

FOR three months there had been hardly a drop of rain. The wind had been almost continuously north-west, and from that to east. Occasionally there were light airs from the south-west, and vapour rose, but there was nothing in it; there was no true south-westerly breeze, and in a few hours the weather-cock returned to the old quarter. Not infrequently the clouds began to gather, and there was every sign that a change was at hand. The barometer at these times fell gradually day after day until at last it reached a point which generally brought drenching storms, but none appeared, and then it began slowly to rise again and we knew that our hopes were vain, and that a week at least must elapse before it would regain its usual height and there might be a chance of declining. At last the disappointment was so keen that the instrument was removed. It was better not to watch it, but to hope for a surprise. The grass became brown, and in many places was killed down to the roots; there was no hay; myriads of swarming caterpillars devoured the fruit trees; the brooks were all dry; water for cattle had to be fetched from ponds and springs miles away; the roads were broken up; the air was loaded with grit; and the beautiful green of the hedges was choked with dust. Birds like the rook, which fed upon worms, were nearly starved, and were driven far and wide for strange food. It was pitiable to see them trying to pick the soil of the meadow as hard as a rock. The everlasting glare was worse than the gloom of winter, and the sense of universal parching thirst became so distressing that the house was preferred to the fields. We were close to a water famine! The Atlantic, the source of all life, was asleep, and what if it should never wake! We know not its ways, it mocks all our science. Close to us lies this great mystery, incomprehensible, and yet our very breath depends upon it. Why should not the sweet tides of soft moist air cease to stream in upon us? No reason could be given why every green herb and living thing should not perish; no reason, save a faith which was blind. For aught we _knew_, the ocean-begotten aërial current might forsake the land and it might become a desert.

One night grey bars appeared in the western sky, but they had too often deluded us, and we did not believe in them. On this particular evening they were a little heavier, and the window-cords were damp. The air which came across the cliff was cool, and if we had dared to hope we should have said it had a scent of the sea in it. At four o’clock in the morning there was a noise of something beating against the panes—they were streaming! It was impossible to lie still, and I rose and went out of doors. No creature was stirring, there was no sound save that of the rain, but a busier time there had not been for many a long month. Thousands of millions of blades of grass and corn were eagerly drinking. For sixteen hours the downpour continued, and when it was dusk I again went out. The watercourses by the side of the roads had a little water in them, but not a drop had reached those at the edge of the fields, so thirsty was the earth. The drought, thank God, was at an end!

SPINOZA

NOW that twenty years have passed since I began the study of Spinoza it is good to find that he still holds his ground. Much in him remains obscure, but there is enough which is sufficiently clear to give a direction to thought and to modify action. To the professional metaphysician Spinoza’s work is already surpassed, and is absorbed in subsequent systems. We are told to read him once because he is historically interesting, and then we are supposed to have done with him. But if “Spinozism,” as it is called, is but a stage of development there is something in Spinoza which can be superseded as little as the _Imitation of Christ_ or the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and it is this which continues to draw men to him. Goethe never cared for set philosophical systems. Very early in life he thought he had found out that they were useless pieces of construction, but to the end of his days he clung to Spinoza, and Philina, of all persons in the world, repeats one of the finest sayings in the _Ethic_. So far as the metaphysicians are carpenters, and there is much carpentering in most of them, Goethe was right, and the larger part of their industry endures wind and weather but for a short time. Spinoza’s object was not to make a scheme of the universe. He felt that the things on which men usually set their hearts give no permanent satisfaction, and he cast about for some means by which to secure “a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity.” I propose now, without attempting to connect or contrast Spinoza with Descartes or the Germans, to name some of those thoughts in his books by which he conceived he had attained his end.

The sorrow of life is the rigidity of the material universe in which we are placed. We are bound by physical laws, and there is a constant pressure of matter-of-fact evidence to prove that we are nothing but common and cheap products of the earth to which in a few moments or years we return. Spinoza’s chief aim is to free us from this sorrow, and to free us from it by _thinking_. The emphasis on this word is important. He continually insists that a thing is not unreal because we cannot imagine it. His own science, mathematics, affords him examples of what _must_ be, although we cannot picture it, and he believes that true consolation lies in the region of that which cannot be imaged but can be thought.

Setting out on his quest, he lays hold at the very beginning on the idea of Substance, which he afterwards identifies with the idea of God. “By Substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself; in other words, that, the conception of which does not need the conception of another thing from which it must be formed.” {34a} “By God, I understand Being absolutely infinite, that is to say, substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” {34b} “God, or substance consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists.” {34c} By the phrases “in itself” and “by itself,” we are to understand that this conception cannot be explained in other terms. Substance must be posited, and there we must leave it. The demonstration of the last-quoted proposition, the 11th, is elusive, and I must pass it by, merely observing that the objection that no idea involves existence, and that consequently the idea of God does not involve it, is not a refutation of Spinoza, who might rejoin that it is impossible not to affirm existence of God as the _Ethic_ defines him. Spinoza escapes one great theological difficulty. Directly we begin to reflect we are dissatisfied with a material God, and the nobler religions assert that God is a Spirit. But if He be a pure spirit whence comes the material universe? To Spinoza pure spirit and pure matter are mere artifices of the understanding. His God is the Substance with infinite attributes of which thought and extension are the two revealed to man, and he goes further, for he maintains that they are one and the same thing viewed in different ways, inside and outside of the same reality. The conception of God, strictly speaking, is not incomprehensible, but it is not _circum_-prehensible; if it were it could not be the true conception of Him.

Spinoza declares that “the human mind possesses an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God” {36}—not of God in His completeness, but it is adequate. The demonstration of this proposition is at first sight unsatisfactory, because we look for one which shall enable us to form an image of God like that which we can form of a triangle. But we cannot have “a knowledge of God as distinct as that which we have of common notions, because we cannot imagine God as we can bodies.” “To your question,” says Spinoza to Boxel, “whether I have as clear an idea of God as I have of a triangle? I answer, Yes. But if you ask me whether I have as clear an image of God as I have of a triangle I shall say, No; for we cannot imagine God, but we can in a measure understand Him. Here also, it is to be observed that I do not say that I altogether know God, but that I understand some of His attributes—not all, nor the greatest part, and it is clear that my ignorance of very many does not prevent my knowledge of certain others. When I learned the elements of Euclid, I very soon understood that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, and I clearly perceived this property of a triangle, although I was ignorant of many others.” {37a}

“Individual things are nothing but affections or modes of God’s attributes, expressing those attributes in a certain and determinate manner,” {37b} and hence “the more we understand individual objects, the more we understand God.” {37c}

The intellect of God in no way resembles the human intellect, for we cannot conceive Him as proposing an end and considering the means to attain it. “The intellect of God, in so far as it is conceived to constitute His essence, is in truth the cause of things, both of their essence and of their existence—a truth which seems to have been understood by those who have maintained that God’s intellect, will, and power are one and the same thing.” {37d}

The whole of God is _fact_, and Spinoza denies any reserve in Him of something unexpressed. “The omnipotence of God has been actual from eternity, and in the same actuality will remain to eternity,” {38} not of course in the sense that everything which exists has always existed as we now know it, or that nothing will exist hereafter which does not exist now, but that in God everything that has been, and will be, eternally _is_.

The reader will perhaps ask, What has this theology to do with the “joy continuous and supreme”? We shall presently meet with some deductions which contribute to it, but it is not difficult to understand that Spinoza, to use his own word, might call the truths set forth in these propositions “blessed.” Let a man once believe in that God of infinite attributes of which thought and extension are those by which He manifests Himself to us; let him see that the opposition between thought and matter is fictitious; that his mind “is a part of the infinite intellect of God”; that he is not a mere transient, outside interpreter of the universe, but himself the soul or law, which is the universe, and he will feel a relationship with infinity which will emancipate him.

It is not true that in Spinoza’s God there is so little that is positive that it is not worth preserving. All Nature is in Him, and if the objector is sincere he will confess that it is not the lack of contents in the idea which is disappointing, but a lack of contents particularly interesting to himself.

The opposition between the mind and body of man as two diverse entities ceases with that between thought and extension. It would be impossible briefly to explain in all its fulness what Spinoza means by the proposition: “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is a body” {39}; it is sufficient here to say that, just as extension and thought are one, considered in different aspects, so body and mind are one. We shall find in the fifth part of the _Ethic_ that Spinoza affirms the eternity of the mind, though not perhaps in the way in which it is usually believed.

Following the order of the _Ethic_ we now come to its more directly ethical maxims. Spinoza denies the freedom commonly assigned to the will, or perhaps it is more correct to say he denies that it is intelligible. The will is determined by the intellect. The idea of the triangle involves the affirmation or volition that its three angles are equal to two right angles. If we understand what a triangle is we are not “free” to believe that it contains more or less than two right angles, nor to act as if it contained more or less than two. The only real freedom of the mind is obedience to the reason, and the mind is enslaved when it is under the dominion of the passions. “God does not act from freedom of the will,” {40a} and consequently “things could have been produced by God in no other manner and in no other order than that in which they have been produced.” {40b}

“If you will but reflect,” Spinoza tells Boxel, “that indifference is nothing but ignorance or doubt, and that a will always constant and in all things determinate is a virtue and a necessary property of the intellect, you will see that my words are entirely in accord with the truth.” {40c} To the same effect is a passage in a letter to Blyenbergh, “Our liberty does not consist in a certain contingency nor in a certain indifference, but in the manner of affirming or denying, so that in proportion as we affirm or deny anything with less indifference, are we the more free.” {41a} So also to Schuller, “I call that thing free which exists and acts solely from the necessity of its own nature: I call that thing coerced which is determined to exist and to act in a certain and determinate manner by another.” {41b} With regard to this definition it might be objected that the necessity does not lie solely in the person who wills but is also in the object. The triangle as well as the nature of man contains the necessity. What Spinoza means is that the free man by the necessity of his nature is bound to assert the truth of what follows from the definition of a triangle and that the stronger he feels the necessity the more free he is. Hence it follows that the wider the range of the intellect and the more imperative the necessity which binds it, the larger is its freedom.

In genuine freedom Spinoza rejoices. “The doctrine is of service in so far as it teaches us that we do everything by the will of God alone, and that we are partakers of the divine nature in proportion as our actions become more and more perfect and we more and more understand God. This doctrine, therefore, besides giving repose in every way to the soul, has also this advantage, that it teaches us in what our highest happiness or blessedness consists, namely, in the knowledge of God alone, by which we are drawn to do those things only which love and piety persuade.” {42a} In other words, being part of the whole, the grandeur and office of the whole are ours. We are anxious about what we call “personality,” but in truth there is nothing in it of any worth, and the less we care for it the more “blessed” we are.

“By the desire which springs from reason we follow good directly and avoid evil indirectly” {42b}: our aim should be the good; in obtaining that we are delivered from evil. To the same purpose is the conclusion of the fifth book of the _Ethic_ that “No one delights in blessedness because he has restrained his affects, but, on the contrary, the power of restraining his lusts springs from blessedness itself.” {43a} This is exactly what the Gospel says to the Law.

Fear is not the motive of a free man to do what is good. “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is not a meditation upon death, but upon life.” {43b} This is the celebrated sixty-seventh proposition of the fourth part. If we examine the proof which directly depends on the sixty-third proposition of the same part—“he who is led by fear, and does what is good in order that he may avoid what is evil, is not led by reason”—we shall see that Spinoza is referring to the fear of the “evil” of hell-fire.

All Spinoza’s teaching with regard to the passions is a consequence of what he believes of God and man. He will study the passions and not curse them. He finds that by understanding them “we can bring it to pass that we suffer less from them. We have, therefore, mainly to strive to acquire a clear and distinct knowledge of each affect.” {43c} “If the human mind had none but adequate ideas it would form no notion of evil.” {44a} “The difference between a man who is led by affect or opinion alone and one who is led by reason” is that “the former, whether he wills it or not, does those things of which he is entirely ignorant, but the latter does the will of no one but himself.” {44b} _They know not what they do_.

The direct influence of Spinoza’s theology is also shown in his treatment of pity, hatred, laughter, and contempt. “The man who has properly understood that everything follows from the necessity of the divine nature, and comes to pass according to the eternal laws and rules of nature, will in truth discover nothing which is worthy of hatred, laughter, or contempt, nor will he pity any one, but, so far as human virtue is able, he will endeavour to _do well_, as we say, and to _rejoice_.” {44c} By pity is to be understood mere blind sympathy. The good that we do by this pity with the eyes of the mind shut ought to be done with them open. “He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives as much as possible to repay the hatred, anger, or contempt of others towards himself with love or generosity. . . . He who wishes to avenge injuries by hating in return does indeed live miserably. But he who, on the contrary, strives to drive out hatred by love, fights joyfully and confidently, with equal ease resisting one man or a number of men, and needing scarcely any assistance from fortune. Those whom he conquers yield gladly, not from defect of strength, but from an increase of it.” {45a}

“Joy is the passion by which the mind passes to a greater perfection: sorrow, on the other hand, is the passion by which it passes to a less perfection.” {45b} “No God and no human being, except an envious one, is delighted by my impotence or my trouble, or esteems as any virtue in us tears, sighs, fears, and other things of this kind, which are signs of mental impotence; on the contrary, the greater the joy with which we are affected, the greater the perfection to which we pass thereby; that is to say, the more do we necessarily partake of the divine nature.” {46} It would be difficult to find an account of joy and sorrow which is closer to the facts than that which Spinoza gives. He lived amongst people Roman Catholic and Protestant who worshipped sorrow. Sorrow was the divinely decreed law of life and joy was merely a permitted exception. He reversed this order and his claim to be considered in this respect as one of the great revolutionary religious and moral reformers has not been sufficiently recognised. It is remarkable that, unlike other reformers, he has not contradicted error by an exaggeration, which itself very soon stands in need of contradiction, but by simple sanity which requires no correction. One reason for this peculiarity is that the _Ethic_ was the result of long meditation. It was published posthumously and was discussed in draft for many years before his death. Usually what we call our convictions are propositions which we have not thoroughly examined in quietude, but notions which have just come into our heads and are irreversible to us solely because we are committed to them. Much may be urged against the _Ethic_ and on behalf of hatred, contempt, and sorrow. The “other side” may be produced mechanically to almost every truth; the more easily, the more divine that truth is, and against no truths is it producible with less genuine mental effort than against those uttered by the founder of Christianity. The question, however, if we are dealing with the New Testament, is not whether the Sermon on the Mount can be turned inside out in a debating society, but whether it does not represent better than anything which the clever leader of the opposition can formulate the principle or temper which should govern our conduct.

There is a group of propositions in the last part of the _Ethic_, which, although they are difficult, it may be well to notice, because they were evidently regarded by Spinoza as helping him to the end he had in view. The difficulty lies in a peculiar combination of religious ideas and scientific form. These propositions are the following:—{47}

“The mind can cause all the affections of the body or the images of things to be related to the idea of God.”

“He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his affects loves God, and loves Him better the better he understands himself and his affects.”

“This love to God above everything else ought to occupy the mind.”

“God is free from passions, nor is He affected with any affect of joy or sorrow.”

“No one can hate God.”

“He who loves God cannot strive that God should love him in return.”