Mann—­a God intoxicated man; an expression which has been quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.  With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as attempted?  With him, as with all great men, there was no effort after sublime emotions.  A plain, practical person, his object in philosophy was only to find a rule on which he could depend to govern his own actions and his own judgment:  and his treatises contain no more than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, and the grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, “De Emendatione Intellectas.”  His language is very beautiful, but elaborate and full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to epitomize it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was his place and business in it, he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found little that he could venture to imitate.  Whatever they professed, they all really guided themselves by their different notions of what they thought desirable; and these notions themselves resting on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience, the experience of one not being the experience of another, men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably failing.  Their mistakes arising, as it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge, things which at one time looked desirable disappointing expectation when obtained, and the wiser course concealing itself often under an uninviting exterior, he desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and endeavour to find, by some surer method, where the real good of man lay.  All this may sound very Pagan, and perhaps it is so.  We must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews’ communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as the interpreter of it.  Some true account of things, however, he thought it likely that there must be, and the question was, how to find it.  Of all forms of human thought, but one, he reflected, would admit of the certainty which he required—­the mathematical; and, therefore, if certain knowledge were attainable at all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which were formally involved in them.  The question was, therefore, of these ideas, these verae ideae, as he calls them,—­what were they, and how were they to be obtained:  if they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must, he felt, be self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious and Platonic.