ate regions. What he for his part needs is the glacier-air, keen and penetrating. He does not ask to be followed; he is like Moses, to whom secrets unknown to the crowd reveal themselves on the heights. But be sure of this: he was the seer of his age; he was in his own day the one who saw deepest into God.
III.
It might have been supposed that, all alone on those snowy peaks, he would turn out in human affairs wrong-headed, utopian, or scornfully skeptical. Nothing of the kind. He was incessantly occupied with the application of his principles to human society. The pessimism of Hobbes and the dreams of Thomas More were equally repugnant to him. One-half, at least, of the "Theologico-Political Treatise" which appeared in 1670, might be reprinted to-day without losing any of its appropriateness. Listen to its admirable title: "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, continens dissertationes aliquot, quibus ostenditur, libertatem philosophandi non tantum salva pietate et reipublicæ pace posse concedi, sed eamdem nisi cum pace reipublicæ ipsaque pietate tolli non posse." For centuries past it had been supposed that society rested on metaphysical dogmas. Spinoza discerns profoundly that these dogmas, assumed to be necessary to humanity, yet cannot escape discussion; that revelation itself, if there be one, traversing, in order to reach us, the faculties of the human mind, is no less than all else amenable to criticism. I wish I could quote in its entirety that admirable Chapter XX., in which our great publicist establishes with masterly skill that dogma—new then, and still contested in our own day—which styles itself liberty of conscience.
"The final end of the state," he says, "consists not in dominating over men, restraining them by fears, subjecting them to the will of others, but, on the contrary, in permitting each one to live in all possible security; that is to say, in preserving intact the natural right of each to live without injury to himself or others. No, I say, the state has not for its end the transformation of men from reasonable beings into animals or automata; it has for end so to act that its citizens should in security develop soul and body, and make free use of their reason. Hence the true end of the state is liberty. Whosoever means to respect the rights of a sovereign should never act in opposition to his decrees; but each has the right to think what he will, and to say what he thinks, provided he content himself with speaking and teaching in the name of pure reason, and do not attempt on his private authority to introduce innovations into the state. For example: a citizen who demonstrates that a certain law is repugnant to sound reason, and holds that for that cause it ought to be abrogated—if he submit his opinions to the judgment of the sovereign, to whom alone it belongs to establish and to abolish laws, and if meanwhile he acts in no wise contrary to law—that man certainly deserves well of the state as the best of citizens. . . .
"Even if we admit the possibility of so stifling men's liberty and laying such a yoke upon them that they dare not even whisper without the approba-
