[Footnote 1:  The conception amor Dei intellectualis in Spinoza is discussed in a dissertation by C. Luelmann, Jena, 1884.]

Spinoza’s ethics is intellectualistic—­virtue is based on knowledge.[1] It is, moreover, naturalistic—­morality is a necessary sequence from human nature; it is a physical product, not a product of freedom; for the acts of the will are determined by ideas, which in their turn are the effects of earlier causes.  The foundation of virtue is the effort after self-preservation:  How can a man desire to act rightly unless he desires to be (IV. prop. 21, 22)?  Since reason never enjoins that which is contrary to nature, it of necessity requires every man to love himself, to seek that which is truly useful to him, and to desire all that makes him more perfect.  According to the law of nature all that is useful is allowable.  The useful is that which increases our power, activity, or perfection, or that which furthers knowledge, for the life of the soul consists in thought (IV. prop. 26; app. cap. 5).  That alone is an evil which restrains man from perfecting the reason and leading a rational life.  Virtuous action is equivalent to following the guidance of the reason in self-preservation (IV. prop. 24).—­Nowhere in Spinoza are fallacies more frequent than in his moral philosophy; nowhere is there a clearer revelation of the insufficiency of his artificially constructed concepts, which, in their undeviating abstractness, are at no point congruent with reality.  He is as little true to his purpose to exclude the imperative element, and to confine himself entirely to the explanation of human actions considered as facts, as any philosopher who has adopted a similar aim.  He relieves the inconsistency by clothing his injunctions under the ancient ideal of the free wise man.  This, in fact, is not the only thing in Spinoza which reminds one of the customs of the Greek moralists.  He renews the Platonic idea of a philosophical virtue, and the opinion of Socrates, that right action will result of itself from true insight.  Arguing from himself, from his own pure and strong desire for knowledge, to mankind in general, he makes reason the essence of the soul, thought the essence of reason, and holds the direction of the impulse of self-preservation to the perfection of knowledge, which is “the better part of us,” to be the natural one.

[Footnote 1:  That virtue which springs from knowledge is alone genuine.  The painful, hence unactive, emotions of pity and repentance may impel to actions whose accomplishment is better than their omission.  Emotion caused by sympathy for others and contrition for one’s own guilt, both of which increase present evil by new ones, have only the value of evils of a lesser kind.  They are salutary for the irrational man, in so far as the one spurs him on to acts of assistance and the other diminishes his pride.  They are harmful to the wise man, or, at least, useless; he is in no need of irrational motives to rational action.  Action from insight is alone true morality.]