of our impotency and self-renunciation (inspectio and despectio, or derelictio, neglectus, contemptus, incuria sui).  The highest of these is humility, pious submission to the divine order of things; its condition, the self-knowledge commended in the title of the Ethics; the primal evil, self-love (Philautia—­ipsissimum peccatum).  Man is unhappy because he seeks happiness.  Happiness is like our shadows; it shuns us when we pursue it, it follows us when we flee from it.  The joys which spring from virtue are an adornment of it, not an enticement to it; they are its result, not its aim.  The ethics of Geulincx, which we cannot further trace out here, surprises one by its approximation to the views of Spinoza and of Kant.  With the former it has in common the principle of love toward God, as well as numerous details; with the latter, the absoluteness of the moral law (in rebus moralibus absolute praecipit ratio aut vetat, nulla interposita conditione); with both the depreciation of sympathy, on the ground that it is a concealed egoistic motive.

The denial of substantiality to individual things, brought in by the occasionalists, is completed by Spinoza, who boldly and logically proclaims pantheism on the basis of Cartesianism and gives to the divine All-one a naturalistic instead of a theological character.

%2.  Spinoza.%

Benedictus (originally Baruch) de Spinoza sprang from a Jewish family of Portugal or Spain, which had fled to Holland to escape persecution at home.  He was born in Amsterdam in 1632; taught by the Rabbin Morteira, and, in Latin, by Van den Ende, a free-thinking physician who had enjoyed a philological training; and expelled by anathema from the Jewish communion, 1656, on account of heretical views.  During the next four years he found refuge at a friend’s house in the country near Amsterdam, after which he lived in Rhynsburg, and from 1664 in Voorburg, moving thence, in 1669, to The Hague, where he died in 1677.  Spinoza lived in retirement and had few wants; he supported himself by grinding optical glasses; and, in 1673, declined the professorship at Heidelberg offered him by Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, because of his love of quiet, and on account of the uncertainty of the freedom of thought which the Elector had assured him.  Spinoza himself made but two treatises public:  his dictations on the first and second parts of Descartes’s Principia Philosophiae, which had been composed for a private pupil, with an appendix, Cogitata Metaphysica, 1663, and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously in 1670, in defense of liberty of thought and the right to unprejudiced criticism of the biblical writings.  The principles expressed in the latter work were condemned by all parties as sacrilegious and atheistic, and awakened concern even in the minds of his friends.  When, in 1675, Spinoza journeyed to Amsterdam with the intention of giving