Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself, when he went on to gather out of his philosophy “that the mind of man being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives it, not that he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or that action, we say that God does it not qua he is Infinite, but qua he is expressed in that man’s nature.”  “Here,” he says, “many readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them in the way of such a supposition.”  Undoubtedly there was reason enough to form, such an anticipation.  As long as the Being whom he so freely names remains surrounded with the associations which in this country we bring with us out of our child years, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to language such as this.  It is not so—­ we know it, and it is enough.  We are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our ordinary theistic conceptions.  They are quite enough, if religion depended on speculative consistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and terrify us.  What are we? what is anything?  If it be not divine, what is it then?  If created—­out of what is it created? and how created—­and why?  These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not care to have them answered at all.  Conscience is the single tribunal to which we will be referred, and conscience declares imperatively that what he says is not true.  But of all this it is painful to speak, and as far as possible we designedly avoid it.  Pantheism is not Atheism, but the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was nothing else but that world which we experience.  It is but one of infinite expressions of Him, a conception which makes us giddy in the effort to realize it.

We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its bearings upon life and human duty.  It was in the search after this last, that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we now expect his conclusions.  To discover the true good of man, to direct his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting felicity, and by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them—­is the aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy.  “Most people,” he adds, “deride or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand