The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 407 pages of information about The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy.

The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 407 pages of information about The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy.

In the living being are time and space.  But in this individual being it is only the changeless element that is made to stand out.  “The life of being that lives” is in this latter sphere of life the unlimited, the universal.  But if it be said “God is all things,” here we understand individuality with all its limitations, its finity, its passing existence.  This notion of pantheism arises out of the conception of unity, not as spiritual unity but abstract unity; and then, when the idea takes its religious form, where only the substance, the One, is possessed of true reality, there is a tendency to forget that it is precisely in presence of this unity that individual and finite things are effaced, and to continue to place these in a material fashion side by side with this unity.  They will not admit the teaching of the Eleatics, who, when they say “There is only One,” add expressly that non-entity is not.  All that is finite would be limitation, a negation of the One, but non-entity, the boundary, term, limit, and that which is limited, exist not at all.

Spinozism has been accused of atheism.  But Spinozism does not teach that God is the world, that He is all things.  Things have indeed a phenomenal existence—­that is, an existence as appearances.  We speak of our existence, and our life is indeed comprised in this existence, but to speak philosophically the world has no reality, it has no existence.  Individual things are finite things to which no reality can be attributed; it may be said of them that they have no existence.

Spinozism—­this is the accusation directed against it—­involves by way of consequence that, if all things make but one, good and evil make but one; there is no difference between them; and thereby all religion is destroyed.  In themselves, it is said there is no difference between good and evil; consequently it is a matter of indifference whether one be righteous or wicked.  It may be granted that in themselves—­that is, in God, who is the sole veritable reality—­the difference between good and evil disappears.  In God there is no evil.  But the difference between good and evil can exist only on condition that God is the evil.  But it cannot be allowed that evil is an affirmative thing, and that this affirmation is in God.  God is good, and nothing else than good; the distinction between good and evil is not present in this unity, in this substance, and comes into existence only with differentiation.

God is unity abiding absolutely in itself.  In the substance there is no differentiation.  The distinction of good and evil begins with the distinction of God from the world, and particularly from man.  It is the fundamental principle of Spinozism with regard to this distinction of God and the world that man must have no other end than God.  The love of God, therefore, it is that Spinozism marks out for man as the law to be followed in order to bring about the healing of this breach.

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The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.