Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/161

SPINOZA: PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY. 139 reason never enjoins that which is contrary to nature, it of necessity requires every man to love himself, to seek that which is truly useful to him, and to desire all that makes him more perfect. According to the law of nature all that is useful is allowable. The useful is that which increases our power, activity, or perfection, or that which furthers knowledge, for the life of the soul consists in thought (IV. prop. 26 ; app. cap. 5). That alone is an evil which restrains man from perfecting the reason and leading a rational life. Virtuous action is equivalent to following the guidance of the reason in self-preservation (IV. prop. 24). — Nowhere in Spinoza are fallacies more frequent than in his moral philosophy ; nowhere is there a clearer revelation of the insufficiency of his artificially constructed concepts, which, in their undeviating abstractness, are at no point congruent with reality. He is as little true to his purpose to exclude the imperative element, and to confine himself entirely to the explanation of human actions considered as facts, as any philosopher who has adopted a similar aim. He relieves the inconsistency by clothing his injunctions under the ancient ideal of the free wise man. This, in fact, is not the only thing in Spinoza which reminds one of the customs of the Greek moralists. He renews the Platonic idea of a philosophical virtue, and the opinion of Socrates, that right action will result of itself from true insight. Arguing from himself, from his own pure and strong desire for knowledge, to mankind in general, he makes reason the essence of the soul, thought the essence of reason, and holds the direction of the impulse of self-preservation to the perfection of knowledge, which is " the better part of us," to be the natural one. All men endeavor after continuance of existence (III. prop. 6) ; why not all after virtue ? If all endeavor after it, why do so few reach the goal? Whence the sadly large number of the irrational, the selfish, the vicious? Whence the evil in the world ? Vice is as truly an outcome of " nature " as virtue. Virtue is power, vice is weakness ; the former is knowledge, the latter ignorance. Whence the powerless natures? Whence defective knowledge? Whence imperfection in general ?