SPINOZA. 121 ismtis im Systeme Spinozas, 1872). Science demands unified comprehension of the given, and seeks the smallest number of principles possible ; but her concepts prove too narrow vessels for the rich plenitude of reality. He who asks fro:n philosophy more than mere special inquiries finds himself confronted by two possibilities: first, starting from one standpoint, or a few such, he may follow a direct course without looking to right or left, at the risk that in his thought-calculus great spheres of life will be wholly left out of view, or, at least, will not receive due consideration ; or, second, beginning from many points of departure and as- cending along converging lines, he may seek a unifying con- clusion. In Spinoza we possess the most brilliant example of the former one-sided, logically consecutive power of (also, no doubt, violence in) thought, while Leibnitz fur- nishes the type of the many-sided, harmonistic thinking. The fact that even the rigorous Spinoza is not infrequently forced out of the strict line of consistency, proves that the man was more many-sided than the thinker would have allowed himself to be. To begin with the formal side of Spinozism : the rational- ism of Descartes is heightened by Spinoza into the impos- ing confidence that absolutely everything is cognizable by the reason, that the intellect is able by its pure concepts and intuitions entirely to exhaust the multiform world of reality, to follow it with its light into its last refuge.* Spinoza is just as much in earnest in regard to the typical character of mathematics. Descartes (with the exception of an example asked for in the second of the Objections, and given as an appendix to the Meditations, in which he endeavors to demonstrate the existence of God and the dis- tinction of body and spirit on the synthetic Euclidean method), had availed himself of the analytic form of presen- tation, on the ground that, though less cogent, it is more
- Heussler's objections {Der Rationalistnus des i Jahrhunderts, 1885, pp.
82-85) to this characterization of Kuno Fischer's are not convincing. The question is not so much about a principle demonstrable by definite citations as about an unconscious motive in Spinoza's thinking. Fischer's views on this point seem to us correct. Spinoza's mode of thinking is, in fact, saturated with this strong confidence in the omnipotence of the reason and the ratiooaJ constitution of true reality.
