“But once for all,” he adds, “this aspect of things will remain intolerable and unintelligible as long as the common notions of free will remain unimproved.”

And of course, and we shall all confess it, if these notions are as false as he supposes them, and we have no power to be anything but what we are, there neither is nor can be such a thing as moral evil; and what we call crimes will no more involve a violation of the will of God, they will no more impair his moral attributes if we suppose him to have willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals.  There will be but, as Spinoza says, an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity.  Moral evil need not disturb us, if—­if we can be nothing but what we are, if we are but as clay.

The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear as we proceed.  We pause, however, to notice one difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which is best disposed of in passing.  Whatever obscurity may lie about the thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able to agree what it is, or whether properly it is anything), the words past, present, future do undoubtedly convey some definite idea with them:  things will be which are not yet, and have been which are no longer.  Now if everything which exists be a necessary mathematical consequence from the nature or definition of the One Being, we cannot see how there can be any time but the present, or how past and future have room for a meaning.  God is, and therefore all properties of him are, just as every property of a circle exists in it as soon as the circle exists.  We may if we like, for convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and say, e.g. that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the rectangle under the parts of the one will equal that under the parts of the other.  But we only mean in reality that these rectangles are equal; and the future relates only to our knowledge of the fact.  Allowing, however, as much as we please, that the condition of England a hundred years hence lies already in embryo in existing causes, it is a paradox to say that such condition exists already in the sense in which the properties of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on the illustration.

It is singular that he should not have noticed the difficulty; not that either it or the answer to it (which no doubt would have been ready enough) are likely to interest any person except metaphysicians, a class of thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.

We proceed to more important matters—­to Spinoza’s detailed theory of Nature chiefly as exhibited in man and in man’s mind, a theory which for its bold ingenuity is the most remarkable which on this dark subject has ever been proposed.  Whether we can believe it or not, is another question; yet undoubtedly it provides an answer for every difficulty; it accepts with equal welcome the extremes of materialism and of spiritualism:  and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy that it will explain phenomena and reconcile difficulties, it is hard to account for the fact that a system which bears such a test so admirably, should nevertheless be so incredible as it is.