wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good
and goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion
can be so extravagant as to forfeit those graces which
are promised not to clearness of intellect, but to
purity of heart. In Spinoza’s own beautiful
language,—“justitia et caritas unicum
et certissimum verae fidei Catholicae signurn est,
et veri Spiritus sancti fructus: et ubicumque
haec reperiuntur, ibi Christus re verg est, et ubicumque
haec desunt deest Christus. Solo namque Christi
Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiae et caritatis.”
We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system
of thought preposterous and even pernicious, but we
cannot refuse him the respect which is the right of
all sincere and honourable men. We will say, indeed,
as much as this, that wherever and on whatever questions
good men are found ranged on opposite sides, one of
three alternatives is always true:—either
that the points of disagreement are purely speculative
and of no moral importance, or that there is a misunderstanding
of language, and the same thing is meant under difference
of words, or else that the real truth is something
different from what is held by any of the disputants,
and that each is representing some important element
which the other ignores or forgets. In either
case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary,
if we would understand what we disagree with, or would
oppose it with success. Spinoza’s influence
over European thought is too great to be denied or
set aside, and if his doctrines be false in part,
or false altogether, we cannot do their work more
surely than by calumny or misrepresentation—a
most obvious truism, which no one now living will
deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps
will begin to produce some effects upon the popular
judgment.
Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we
are able, we propose to examine the Pantheistic philosophy
in the first and only logical form which as yet it
has assumed. Whatever may have been the case
with his disciples, in the author of this system there
was no unwillingness to look closely at it, or follow
it out to its conclusions; and whatever other merits
or demerits belong to Spinoza, at least he has done
as much as with language can be done to make himself
thoroughly understood—a merit in which it
cannot be said that his followers have imitated him—Pantheism,
as it is known in England, being a very synonym of
vagueness and mysticism.
The fact is, that both in friend and enemy alike,
there has been a reluctance to see Spinoza as he really
was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
claimed him as a Christian—a position which
no little disguise was necessary to make tenable;
the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have called
him an Atheist —which is still more extravagant;
and even a man like Novalis, who, it might have been
expected, would have had something reasonable to say,
could find no better name for him than a Colt trunkner