his Ethics,[1] “that the infinite essence and the eternity of God are known to all. . . . That men have not an equally clear cognition of God as they have of ordinary abstract ideas, is due to the fact that God cannot be imagined, as bodies are imagined, and that they have associated the name of God with the images of things that they are accustomed to see.” All the ignorance and unwisdom whose consequences Spinoza sets forth in the Third and Fourth Parts of his Ethics, are thus declared, in this passage, to be due to the failure of the ordinary human mind to reflect upon, and to observe, an idea of the truth, i.e. of God, which it still always possesses, and which not the least of minds can really be without. For God’s essence is “equally in the part and in the whole.” Thus vast, then, is the difference in our whole view of ourselves and of the universe which is to be the outcome of mere self-consciousness. Yet the same Spinoza, in a passage not long since cited in our notes, can assert that whoever has a true idea knows that he has it, and in a parallel passage can even make light of all reflective insight, as a useless addition to one's true ideas.
This really marvellous vacillation of Spinoza, as regards the central importance of self-consciousness in the whole life of man and of the universe, is full of lessons as to the fallacy of ignoring the positive meaning of reflective insight. This positive meaning once admitted, it is impossible to assert that any limited series of reflective acts can exhaust the self-representative significance of any concrete life. The properties of the number-series, the inexhaustible wealth of the concept of Order, and the fecundity of the mathematical “conclusion from n to n + 1,” are mere hints of what a reflective series implies, and of the infinity of every genuine reflective series. For, on the one hand, we have now sufficiently seen that the fecundity in question is due to the essentially reflective character of the process whereby the conclusion from n to n + 1 is justified.[2] On the other hand, our argument as to the
- ↑ Part II, Prop. 47, Scholium.
- ↑ Dedekind, op. cit., p. 15, §§ 4, 69, has given a formal proof of the validity of the “conclusion from n to n + 1.” His proof, an extraordinarily brilliant feat of logical analysis, has been exhaustively analyzed, by Schroeder, in the passage before cited. It involves a peculiarly subtle reflection upon what the process of self-representation implies, — a reflection as easy to ignore as it is important to bring to clear light.
