II The Spirit of Spinoza

YET Spinoza was not wanting in that timidity and that fear of unbridled instinct which stood dictator over the social philosophy of Hobbes. He knew as well as Hobbes the dangers of a democracy that could not discipline itself. “Those who have had experience of how changeful the temper of the people is, are almost in despair. For the populace is governed not by reason but by emotion; it is headlong in everything, and easily corrupted by avarice and luxury.”¹ And even more than Hobbes he withdrew from the affairs of men and sought in the protection of a suburban attic the peace and solitude which were the vital medium of his thought. He found that sometimes at least, “truth hath a quiet breast.” “Se tu sarai solo,” wrote Leonardo, “tu sarai tutto tuo.” And surely Goethe thought of Spinoza when he said: “No one can produce anything important unless he isolate himself.”

But this dread of the crowd was only a part of Spinoza’s nature, and not the dominant part. His fear of men was lost in his boundless capacity for affection; he tried so hard to understand men that he could not help but love them. “I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand, human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions ... not as vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.”² Even the accidents of time and space were sinless to his view, and all the world found room in the abundance of his heart. “Spinoza deified the All in order to find peace in the face of it,” says Nietzsche:³ but perhaps, too, because all love is deification.

All in all, history shows no man more honest and independent; and the history of philosophy shows no man so sincere, so far above quibbling and dispute and the picking of petty flaws, so eager to receive the truth even when brought by the enemy, so ready to forgive even persecution in the depth and breadth of his tolerance. No man who suffered so much injustice made so few complaints. He became great because he could merge his own suffering in the suffering of all,—a mark of all deep men. “They who have not suffered,” says Ibsen,—and, one might add, suffered with those they saw suffer,—“never create; they only write books.”

Spinoza did not write much; the long-suffering are seldom long-winded. A fragment On the Improvement of the Understanding; a brief volume on religion and the state; the Ethics; and as he began to write the chapter on democracy in the Political Treatise consumption conquered him. Bacteria take no bribes.