but from partial passion or impulse; and freedom not from passion, but from uncoördinated and uncompleted passion. We are free only where we know.1 To be a superman is to be free not from the restraints of social justice and amenity, but from the individualism of the instincts. With this completeness and integrity comes the equanimity of the wise man; not the aristocratic self-complacency of Aristotle's hero, much less the supercilious superiority of Nietzsche's ideal, but a more comradely poise and peace of mind. "Men who are good by reason—i. e., men who, under the guidance of reason, seek what is useful to them-desire nothing for themselves which they do not also desire for the rest of mankind." 2 To be great is not to be placed above humanity, ruling others; but to stand above the partialities and futilities of uninformed desire, and to rule one's self.

This is a nobler freedom than that which men call free will; for the will is not free, and perhaps there is no "will." And let no one suppose that because he is no longer "free," he is no longer morally responsible for his behavior and the structure of his life. Precisely because men's actions are determined by their memories, society must for its protection form its citizens through their hopes and fears into some measure of social order and coöperation. All education presupposes determinism, and pours into the open mind of youth a store of prohibitions which are expected to participate in determining conduct. "The evil which ensues from evil deeds is not therefore less to be feared because it comes of necessity; whether our actions are free or not, our motives still are hope and fear. Therefore the assertion is false that I would leave no room for precepts and commands." 3 On the contrary,

determinism makes for a better moral life: it teaches us not to

1 Cf. Professor Dewey: "A physician or engineer is free in his thought and his action in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Possibly we find here the key to any freedom."-Human Nature and Conduct; New York, 1922; p. 303.

2 IV, 18, note; cf. Whitman: "By God, I will not have anything that all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms."

3 Epistle 43.

1

men

despise or ridicule any one, or be angry with any one; are "not guilty"; and though we punish miscreants, it will be without hate; we forgive them because they know not what they do.

Above all, determinism fortifies us to expect and to bear both faces of fortune with an equal mind; we remember that all things follow by the eternal decrees of God. Perhaps even it will teach us the "intellectual love of God," whereby we shall accept the laws of nature gladly, and find our fulfillment within her limitations. He who sees all things as determined cannot complain, though he may resist; for he "perceives things under a certain species of eternity," 2 and he understands that his mischances are not chances in the total scheme; that they find some justification in the eternal sequence and structure of the world. So minded, he rises from the fitful pleasures of passion to the high serenity of contemplation which sees all things as parts of an eternal order and development; he learns to smile in the face of the inevitable, and "whether he comes into his own now, or in a thousand years, he sits content." 3 He learns the old lesson that God is no capricious personality absorbed in the private affairs of his devotees, but the invariable sustaining order of the universe. Plato words the same conception beautifully in the Republic: "He whose mind is fixed upon true being has no time to look down upon the little affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and enmity in the struggle against them; his eye is ever directed towards fixed and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates, and to these he would, as far as he can, conform himself." 4 "That which is necessary," says Nietzsche, "does not offend me. Amor fati"-love of fate-"is the core of my nature." 5 Or Keats: 1 II, end.

2 II, 44, cor. 2.

3 Whitman.

4 § 500.

5 Ecce Homo, p. 130. It was rather Nietzsche's hope than his attainment.

To bear all naked truths,

And to envisage circumstance, all calm:

That is the top of sovereignty.1

Such a philosophy teaches us to say Yea to life, and even to death—“a free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life." 2 It calms our fretted egos with its large perspective; it reconciles us to the limitations within which our purposes must be circumscribed. It may lead to resignation and an Orientally supine passivity; but it is also the indispensable basis of all wisdom and all strength.

4. Religion and Immortality

After all, as we perceive, Spinoza's philosophy was an attempt to love even a world in which he was outcast and alone; again like Job, he typified his people, and asked how it could be that even the just man, like the chosen people, should suffer persecution and exile and every desolation. For a time the conception of the world as a process of impersonal and invariable law soothed and sufficed him; but in the end his essentially religious spirit turned this mute process into something almost lovable. He tried to merge his own desires with the universal order of things, to become an almost indistinguishable part of nature. "The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature." 3 Indeed, our individual separateness is in a sense illusory; we are parts of the great stream of law and cause, parts of God; we are the flitting forms of a being greater than ourselves, and endless while we die. Our bodies are cells in the body of the race, our race is an incident in the drama of life; our minds are the fitful flashes of an eternal light. "Our mind, in so far as it understands, is an eternal mode of thinking, which is determined by another mode of thinking, and this one again 1 Hyperion, II, 203.

2 Ethics, IV, 67.

3 De Emendatione, p. 230.

by another, and so on to infinity; so that they all constitute at the same time the eternal and infinite intellect of God." 1 In this pantheistic merging of the individual with the All, the Orient speaks again: we hear the echo of Omar, who “never called the One two," and of the old Hindu poem: “Know in thyself and All one self-same soul; banish the dream that sunders part from whole." 2 "Sometimes," said Thoreau, "as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be." As such parts of such a whole we are immortal. "The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal.” 3 This is the part that conceives things sub specie eternitatis; the more we so conceive things, the more eternal our thought is. Spinoza is even more than usually obscure here; and after endless controversy among interpreters his language yet speaks differently to different minds. Sometimes one imagines him to mean George Eliot's immortality by repute, whereby that which is most rational and beautiful in our thought and our lives survives us to have an almost timeless efficacy down the years. Sometimes again Spinoza seems to have in mind a personal and individual immortality; and it may be that as death loomed up so prematurely in his path he yearned to console himself with this hope that springs eternally in the human breast. Yet he insistently differentiates eternity from everlastingness: "If we pay attention to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are conscious of the eternity of their minds; but they confuse eternity with duration, and attribute it to imagination or memory, which they believe will remain after death." 4 But like Aristotle, Spinoza, though talking of immortality, denies the survival of personal memory. "The mind can neither imagine nor recollect anything save while in the body." 5 Nor does he believe

1 Ethics, V, 40, note.

2 In Pollock, 169, 145. 3 Ethics, V, 23.

4 V, 34, note.

5 V, 21.

in heavenly rewards: "Those are far astray from a true estimate of virtue who expect for their virtue, as if it were the greatest slavery, that God will adorn them with the greatest rewards; as if virtue and the serving of God were not happiness itself and the greatest liberty." 1 "Blessedness," reads the last proposition of Spinoza's book, "is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself." And perhaps in the like manner, irnmortality is not the reward of clear thinking, it is clear thought itself, as it carries up the past into the present and reaches out into the future, so overcoming the limits and narrowness of time, and catching the perspective that remains eternally behind the kaleidoscope of change; such thought is immortal because every truth is a permanent creation, part of the eternal acquisition of man, influencing him endlessly.

With this solemn and hopeful note the Ethics ends. Seldom has one book enclosed so much thought, and fathered so much commentary, while yet remaining so bloody a battleground for hostile interpretations. Its metaphysic may be faulty, its psychology imperfect, its theology unsatisfactory and obscure; but of the soul of the book, its spirit and essence, no man who has read it will speak otherwise than reverently. In the concluding paragraph that essential spirit shines forth in simple eloquence:

Thus I have completed all I wished to show concerning the power of the mind over emotions, or the freedom of the mind. From which it is clear how much a wise man is in front of and how stronger he is than an ignorant one, who is guided by lust alone. For an ignorant man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes, never enjoys one true satisfaction of the mind: he lives, moreover, almost unconscious of himself, God, and things, and as soon as he ceases to be passive, ceases to be. On the contrary the wise man, in so far as he is considered as such, is scarcely moved in spirit; he is conscious of himself, of God, and things by a certain eternal necessity; he never ceases to be, and always enjoys satisfaction of mind. If the road I have shown to

1 II, 49, note.