Spinoza, affirms that God loves Himself with an infinite intellectual love; that the intellectual love of the mind towards God is the selfsame love with which God loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity—­that is to say, that the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself.  And after these tragic, these desolating propositions, we are told in the last proposition of the whole book, that which closes and crowns this tremendous tragedy of the Ethic, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself, and that our repression of our desires is not the cause of our enjoyment of virtue, but rather because we find enjoyment in virtue we are able to repress our desires.  Intellectual love! intellectual love! what is this intellectual love?  Something of the nature of a red flavour, or a bitter sound, or an aromatic colour, or rather something of the same sort as a love-stricken triangle or an enraged ellipse—­a pure metaphor, but a tragic metaphor.  And a metaphor corresponding tragically with that saying that the heart also has its reasons.  Reasons of the heart! loves of the head! intellectual delight! delicious intellection!—­tragedy, tragedy, tragedy!

And nevertheless there is something which may be called intellectual love, and that is the love of understanding, that which Aristotle meant by the contemplative life, for there is something of action and of love in the act of understanding, and the beatific vision is the vision of the total truth.  Is there not perhaps at the root of every passion something of curiosity?  Did not our first parents, according to the Biblical story, fall because of their eagerness to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to be as gods, knowers of this knowledge?  The vision of God—­that is to say, the vision of the Universe itself, in its soul, in its inmost essence—­would not that appease all our longing?  And this vision can fail to satisfy only men of a gross mind who do not perceive that the greatest joy of man is to be more man—­that is, more God—­and that man is more God the more consciousness he has.

And this intellectual love, which is nothing but the so-called platonic love, is a means to dominion and possession.  There is, in fact, no more perfect dominion than knowledge; he who knows something, possesses it.  Knowledge unites the knower with the known.  “I contemplate thee and in contemplating thee I make thee mine”—­such is the formula.  And to know God, what can that be but to possess Him?  He who knows God is thereby himself God.