necessity of his own nature alone. So God freely understands himself and everything else, because it follows solely from the necessity of his own nature that he must understand everything. You see then that I make freedom consist not in a free decision of the will, but in free necessity. …
Imagine, if you can, that a stone, while its motion continues, is conscious, and knows that so far as it can it endeavors to persist in its motion. This stone, since it is conscious only of its own endeavor and deeply interested therein (minime indifferens), will believe that it is perfectly free and continues in motion for no other reason than that it so wills. Now such is this freedom of man's will which every one boasts of possessing, and which consists only in this, that men are aware of their own desires and ignorant of the causes by which those desires are determined. So an infant thinks his appetite for milk is free; so a child in anger thinks his will is for revenge, in fear that it is for flight. Again, a drunkard thinks he speaks of his free will things which, when sober, he would fain not have spoken.[1]
In 1675 the correspondence with Oldenburg is resumed.[2] By this time the "Ethics" were completely written, and Oldenburg exhorts him to publish the book, though not with such pressing earnestness as he used in former years. He wishes to have some copies sent over to England, and will undertake to dispose of them; yet he wishes their consignment to him not to be talked of. His temper had probably become less valiant since he read the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus."
Spinoza writes, in answer to Oldenburg,[3] that he did go to Amsterdam to see about printing the "Ethics." But the rumor had gone before him that he had in the press an utterly atheistic book; and certain theologians had actually commenced proceedings against him. The Cartesians, who had by this time a respectable reputation to preserve, were only too glad to find a convenient and edifying occasion for disclaiming Spinoza, and joined eagerly in the cry against him. He determined accordingly to put off the publication; and the result was that the "Ethics" did not appear in his lifetime. The work had a certain private circulation, however, among Spinoza's friends. In the same year, 1675, we have a series of letters raising sundry questions on the most abstruse points in the system. The objections here stated are by far the most acute of those which Spinoza had to encounter from his various correspondents, and it gave him no small trouble to answer them. He does not, indeed, give a complete answer, and all but admits that he cannot. The chief part in these letters is now assigned to Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhausen, a young German nobleman, who was intimate with both Leibnitz and Spinoza, and afterwards became a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and was distinguished in mathematics and physics, and most chiefly by advances in optics. In the construction of lenses, in particular, he arrived at brilliant results; and one may guess that this special study was the common ground on which his acquaintance with Spinoza was first formed.[4]
In 1676 Spinoza received an extraordinary letter dated from Florence, and written by one Albert Burgh, identified by Van Vloten's plausible conjecture with the fellow-lodger whose facilities of intercourse with Spinoza Simon de Vries had envied, and of whose temper and capacities Spinoza had expressed the doubtful opinion already quoted. He now informed Spinoza that he had been received into the Church of Rome, and proceeded, to denounce with all the zeal of a proselyte the profane philosophy he had abandoned. He tells Spinoza that all his learning is merely chimerical, and laments that he should suffer himself to be so deceived by the devil. He asks, with delightful simplicity:—
How do you know that your philosophy is the best of all that are, or have been, or will be taught in the world? Have you examined all the ancient and modern systems of philosophy which are taught here, in India, and all over the face of the earth? And even if you have, how do you know you have chosen the right one?
Spinoza framed the obvious retort in the easiest and most effective manner by repeating the convert's own words: —
How do you know that your teachers are the best of all those who teach, or have taught,
- ↑ Ep. LXII., §§ 2-4. The latest editor of the letters objects to Bruder's division into paragraphs as pedantic: a principle which, if consistently carried out, would make it impossible to give a reference to any passage in most of the classics, to say nothing of the chapters and verses in the Bible.
- ↑ Ep. XVII., et seq.
- ↑ Ep. XIX.
- ↑ Tschirnhausen has received, I think, hard measure from Van Vloten and others for the unacknowledged use of Spinoza's work in his "Medicina Mentis." Not only was it the habit of the time to be careless in this duty, but Tschirnhausen may not unreasonably have been of opinion that his only way to secure a fair hearing for Spinoza's ideas was to conceal their true authorship. It is certain, however, that he gave offence to both Huygens and Leibnitz by appropriating, without acknowledgment, unpublished ideas which they had communicated to him (Van Vloten, Benedictus de Spinoza, App. III.).
