to speak of phenomena alone, of noumena not at all: it is true in a measure, for doubtless all our thoughts, ideas, and perceptions are in greater or less degree colored and qualified by the subjective condition; but, taken as a statement of the full fact in the case, it is grossly, suicidally false. For if there be no actual vital relation of thought to fact, if consciousness, carefully and justly interpreted, be not the record and transcript of truth, its impress and revelation, then are we cut off utterly from all possibility of knowledge, and thrown without help or resource upon the devouring waste of universal scepticism.

The ground of Spinoza, therefore, in this matter — the integrity of consciousness, the knowledge through it of the fact it reveals stands unimpeached and unimpeachable; the limit of possible exploration is the only point upon which there is chance of question. Thought is the recognized presence of truth, its voice heard and felt in the soul of man. The universe, reality, the realm of substance, stands present to the mind, and man sees and knows as he feels and is. God shines into the depths of his being, and he sees God. The revelation is immediate; the presence is intimate and living, not more, but less, doubtful to man than the fact of his own existence. Here is the most certain of all certainties, the very essence of reality itself.

Obscure points are, without doubt, involved in the solutions; delicate tasks remain to be done. To purge the vision of all error, to correct the chromatic refraction of the lens, to make the eye single, that it may see purely and truly, is not easy, but difficult. Yet the embarrassment lies not against such metaphysical inquiries alone; it belongs to all practical life, all perception, all effort, all behavior in our relations to To rise superior to the individual and personal limitation, and stand in the universal truth and justice alone, is a work intensely arduous, a life-long labor. But none the less is it imperative and vital. The truth is real and requires to be sought; the judgment is true, and requires to be purged and cultured.

men.

To say that Spinoza did not exhaust this problem, did not lay fully bare this deep mystery of existence, is only to say

that man has never yet been able to transcend the strange dualism of his nature. Perpetually runs this factor of the finite in every product; and no subtlest mathematics, however it may reduce, can ever eliminate it. It colors conception itself, and all our thought is cast in its form. The subtilties of this relation are too deep for human exploration. Certain gleams shine upon us, a certain fact everywhere presides; these are all we know. Finite is film and concealment, yet shadow and symbol of infinite, its method and illustration. The universe is the vesture and also the radiant face of God. Infinite is ever the transcendent and living, the reality of all, the beyond of time and space, of experience and possession, the ever-beckoning yet ever-unappropriated ideal. The manner of the connection of these, their mutual interfusion, so that everywhere there is contradiction yet unity, separation yet blending, how infinite takes on finite, how finite reveals infinite, we can never know. Existence is twofold, man himself dual, and while so he can never rend away the mystery. Here is the crux philosophia, the unanswered question through all the ages. This problem once solved, the riddle of life is explained, the mystery of being melts away; man becomes omniscient, and God. Spinoza could not succeed here. Bravely he wrestled and wrought; but he, too, like every athlete before him, has won only a partial victory.

But shall we not say that he has in this matter put the emphasis right, exalting to its true place and worth the world of substance, realm of the everlasting? Children of time as we are, we have need to reinforce ourselves from the eternities. Misfortunes betide, disappointment follows upon disappointment, prop after prop is struck away, until all we had leaned upon is taken, and we stand unsupported and ready to fall. Bereavements come, the dear ones of our heart are withdrawn beyond recall, and we are left in loneliness, desolation, and sorrow. How can we keep our poise and strength now, but by betaking ourselves to the bosom of the Infinite Truth and Substance, finding that here all is well, and all remains? There is no loss to the soul. In every solitude is society, and in bereavement itself possession. And sometimes we must steel ourselves, that we be not unduly

affected; remembering still, in the midst of whatever harrowing or distracting scenes, in the presence of terrible suffering, or the wildest outbreak of crime, that great Benignity and Order is supreme, and the Vindicator of all shall be revealed. Spinoza brings forward and finely illustrates this general view in his doctrine of the inadequate and the adequate ideas. Through the one come limitation, intoxication, vassalage; by the other, enlargement, clear vision, freedom, and exhaustless measures of power. In the one, man is poor, perishable, and trivial, sport of circumstance, borne captive of sin, the creature of an hour; in the other, he is rich and immortal, lord of the worlds, denizen of the eternities, his inheritance one with the infinitude of God.

This is far enough from having in it anything of indifferentism, or of base cowardly surrender. It is conquest, not withdrawal. It is, having done all, to stand. Not renouncing any task or toil, it sees and accepts all, works with a will to the end, and at the end still holds and trusts, remembering the soul's self greater than aught finite, and its possession more than time. It is heaven-wide of any passiveness or unconcern; it is wakefulness, love, attainment, continence. It is the constancy of courage, the ripeness of action, the very crown and consummation of loyalty.

Such was it eminently with Spinoza. He never withdrew himself in indifference from the world, never looked coldly upon the men or things around him. Deeply, reverently, he cherished their presence, and delighted in the exhilarations so afforded. Before all outer privilege, he accounts the social. The sympathy of the human soul is very sweet. In the midst of the grave and dispassionate reasonings of the Ethica he declares, "Of all in nature, there is nothing given of such significance and value for man as the presence of a brother man living according to reason." In this, he deems, was the divineness of Jesus. He was temple of God, God's Son, for in him God, "the eternal Wisdom, most of all manifested and revealed himself."

And he never shrank from responsibility, or blinked any task or duty. Ardently he threw himself into the struggle for liberty, into the questions, too, of his hour and time, and did a

man's work therein. Deep-flowing pity and commiseration for those persecuted and slain, the victims of religious hate and cruelty, and indignant remonstrance and rebuke for the persecutors, came from this pantheist, who sinks all in God, and dwells speculatively in the profoundest depths of repose, this idealist, who regards all individual events, all persons themselves, as but appearances, mere modes and accidents of the one universal being. Referring, probably, to the cruel persecutions done under Prince Maurice, and with his eye particularly, as would seem, upon the atrocious judicial murder of Olden Barneveldt, who, guilty only of a broad humanity and quenchless love for freedom, and with the record of a long life of unsullied public and private virtue, of distinguished nobleness and worth, was brought, at the age of seventy-two, to the scaffold, Spinoza speaks thus:

"What worse thing can be conceived for a republic, than that true and venerable men, because they are dissentients in opinion, and know not to dissemble, should, like malefactors, be sent into exile? What more fell and fatal, than that men, without ground of crime or offence, but only because they are of free spirit, should be counted as enemies and led to slaughter, and that the scaffold, appropriately the terror of the bad, should become a grand stage for the exhibition of highest examples of fortitude and bravery? "*

And then that other point, made prominent and emphasized by Spinoza, the utter sinking of the human in the divine, making man only a particle and modal expression of God. "Mens humana," he says, "est pars infiniti intellectus Dei." He affirms for man the deepest dependence on God; the human mind, he insists, lives and acts only in and through His vitalizing breath; the thoughts of the soul are, as he expressly declares, only God's thought in the soul. Now shall we not say of this, that it has large measure of truth? What height of meaning lies in a human presence! During its visible abode with us, our eyes are holden, that we do not see it for all it is. But when separation comes, when through death it is withdrawn, what significance gathers upon that history! What sacredness invests the memory, clothing all

* Tract. Theol.-Polit., Cap. 20.

with a sort of high divine character, - the eye-beam, the look, the spoken voice wherein dwelt such music and love, the fleshly garniture even! We feel that we have seen something more than of time, more than finitude, more than death. God's face has beamed, God's voice has spoken to us in this the expressive language of symbol. We have here beheld a radiance or ray of the Infinite. It is a sacred, starry recollection evermore.

And again, how deeply, how vitally, we depend on the Infinite! As we receive, we have. Our thoughts are not our own; we do not originate, and we cannot command them; they come to us by Divine immission and inspiration. The nearer we stand to God, so much the more enriched and fruitful we are, receiving the visit of the heavenly messengers. We can in this matter but put ourselves in position to receive. All good gifts of sight, all high perceptions, all genuine power, are by direct inspiration and illumination of God. Cut off from the Infinite Soul, we are nothing.

No base person,

The creed in this case testifies of the man. no trifler, none living on the low plane of the merely sensuous life, could have been visited by such a conception, or have so devoted himself life-long to its elaboration. Men have called Spinoza "God-drunken." He is so penetrated and possessed of God, so dwelling in essence and substance, that he forgets himself, forgets the world, thinking only of the absolute and imperishable. His eye gazes after Being; he would fain rest in its presence, knowing naught and loving naught but the Infinite. No provision is made here for the sensuous; the world of the seen is annihilated, only Substance is. This contrasts strongly with that apotheosis of the senses, which, however refined and concealed, we find at bottom in nearly all professed religious literature. Virtue, Spinoza declares, is its own reward," Beatitudo non est virtutis præmium, sed ipsa virtus." Nor, he adds, do we rejoice in it because we thereby restrain the passions, but we have power to restrain the passions in the fact that we rejoice in virtue.

And the record corresponds. It is throughout of a brave, genial, royal man, one dwelling in light, equal to his every occasion, living serenely and divinely. Perfect self-possession,