this happiness, this beatitudo, of Spinoza, that consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop, xxxvi.).  Our happiness—­that is to say, our liberty—­consists in the constant and eternal love of God towards men.  So affirms the corollary to this thirty-sixth proposition.  And all this in order to arrive at the conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole Ethic, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.  The everlasting refrain!  Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.

And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice of reason.  And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.  And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one irresistible argument, the argument ad hominem.  Was he happy, Benedict Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of happiness?  Was he free?

In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic part of that tremendous tragedy of his Ethic, the poor desperate Jew of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the truth of eternal life.  Let us hear what he says:  “It would appear that they esteem piety and religion—­and, indeed, all that is referred to fortitude or strength of mind—­as burdens which they expect to lay down after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not for their piety and religion in this life.  Nor is it even this hope alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they are menaced after death also influences them to live—­in so far as their impotence and poverty of spirit permits—­in conformity with the prescription of the Divine law.  And were not this hope and this fear infused into the minds of men—­but, on the contrary, did they believe that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden of piety in this—­they would return to their natural inclinations, preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would follow fortune rather than reason.  But all this appears no less absurd than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a soul (amens) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as to be scarcely worth refuting (quae adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri mereantur).”