he says to his friends, in answer to their question, “veritas index sui est et falsi.  Veritas se ipsam patefacit.”  These original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are contradictions in terms:—­“Ut sciam me scire necessario debeo prius scire.  Hinc pater quod certitudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam objectivam. ...Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne tollatur dubium; hint sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum veritatis quaerere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est via, et ipsa vetitas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia illa idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur.”  (De Emend.  Intell.)

The opinion of this Review on reasonings of such a kind has been too often expressed to require us now to say how insecure they appear to us.  When we remember the thousand conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle’s less pretending canon promises a safer road.  Ho pasi dokei, “what all men think,” says Aristotle, touto einai phamen, “this we say is,”—­“and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.”  We are to see, however, what these idete are which Spinoza offers as self-evident.  All will turn upon that; for, of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his canon, when his friends, every one of them, so floundered and stumbled among what he regarded as his simplest propositions, requiring endless signa veritalis, and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to “recognize them as elementary certainties.”  Modern readers may, perhaps, be more fortunate.  We produce at length the definitions and axioms of the first book of the “Ethica,” and they may judge for themselves:—­

Definitions.

1.  By a thing which is causa sui, its own cause, I mean a thing the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which cannot be conceived of except as existing. 2.  I call a thing finite, suo genere, when it can be circumscribed by another (or others) of the same nature, e.g. a given body is called finite, because we can always conceive another body larger than it; but body is not circumscribed by thought, nor thought by body. 3.  By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived of by itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the conception of anything else as the cause of it. 4.  By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance as constituting the essence of substance. 5.  Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in something else, by and through which it is conceived. 6.  God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses His eternal and infinite essence.