infinite intellect.”  All possible degrees of perfection have come into being, including sin and error, which represent the lowest grade.  The universe forms a chain of degrees of perfection, of which none must be wanting:  particular cases of defect are justified by the perfection of the whole, which would be incomplete without the lowest degree of perfection, vice and wickedness.  Here we see Spinoza following a path which Leibnitz was to broaden out into a highway in his Theodicy.  Both favor the quantitative view of the world, which softens the antitheses, and reduces distinctions of kind to distinctions of degree.  Not till Kant was the qualitative view of the world, which had been first brought into ethics by Christianity, restored to its rights.  An ethics which denies freedom and evil is nothing but a physics of morals.

In his theory of the state Spinoza follows Hobbes pretty closely, but rejects absolutism, and declares democracy, in which each is obedient to self-imposed law, to be the form of government most in accordance with reason. (So in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, while in the later Tractatus Politicus he gives the preference to aristocracy.) In accordance with the supreme right of nature each man deems good, and seeks to gain, that which seems to him useful; all things belong to all, each may destroy the objects of his hate.  Conflict and insecurity prevail in the state of nature as a result of the sensuous desires and emotions (homines ex natura hostes); and they can be done away with only through the establishment of a society, which by punitive laws compels everyone to do, and leave undone, that which the general welfare demands.  Strife and breach of faith become sin only in the state; before its formation that alone was wrong which no one had the desire and power to do.  Besides this mission, however, of protecting selfish interests by the prevention of aggression, the civil community has a higher one, to subserve the development of reason; it is only in the state that true morality and true freedom are possible, and the wise man will prefer to live in the state, because he finds more freedom there than in isolation.  Thus the dislocation of concepts, which is perceptible in Spinoza’s ethics, repeats itself in his politics.  First, virtue is based on the impulse of self-preservation and the good is equated with that which is useful to the individual; then, with a transformation of mere utility into “true” utility, the rational moment is brought in (first as practical prudence, next as the impulse after knowledge, and then, with a gradual change of meaning, as moral wisdom), until, finally, in strange contrast to the naturalistic beginning, the Christian idea of virtue as purity, self-denial, love to our neighbors and love to God, is reached.  In a similar way “Spinoza conceives the starting point of the state naturalistically, its culmination idealistically."[1]

[Footnote 1:  C. Schindler in his dissertation Ueber den Begriff des Guten und Nuetzlichen bei Spinoza, Jena, 1885, p. 42, a work, however, which does not penetrate to the full depth of the matter.  Cf.  Eucken, Lebensanschauungen, p. 406.]