History of the Jews, Vol. 5 (of 6). Graetz Heinrich

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СКАЧАТЬ generally, and thought out new views. The chain of reasoning suggested to Spinoza in the preparation of his defense caused him doubtless to give wider extension and bearing to this question. It gave him the opportunity to treat of freedom of thought and inquiry generally, and so to lay the foundation of the first of his suggestive writings, which have conferred upon him literary immortality. In the village to which he had withdrawn, 1656–60, and later in Rhynsburg, where he also spent several years, 1660–64, Spinoza occupied himself (while polishing lenses, which handicraft he had learned to secure his moderate subsistence) with the Cartesian philosophy and the elaboration of the work entitled "The Theologico-Political Treatise." His prime object was to spread the conviction that freedom of thought can be permitted without prejudice to religion and the peace of the state; furthermore, that it must be permitted, for if it were forbidden, religion and peace could not exist in the state.

      The apology for freedom of thought had been rendered harder rather than easier for Spinoza, by the subsidiary ideas with which he crossed the main lines of his system. He could not philosophically find the source of law, and transferred its origin to might. Neither God, nor man's conscience, according to Spinoza, is the fountain of the eternal law which rules and civilizes mankind; it springs from the whole lower natural world. He made men to a certain extent "like the fishes of the sea, like creeping things, which have no master." Large fish have the right, not only to drink water, but also to devour smaller fish, because they have the power to do so; the sphere of right of the individual man extends as far as his sphere of might. This natural right does not recognize the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice, submission and force. But because such unlimited assertion on the part of each must lead to a perpetual state of war of all against all, men have tacitly, from fear, or hope, or reason, given up their unlimited privileges to a collective body, the state. Out of two evils – on the one hand, the full possession of their sphere of right and might, tending to mutual destruction, and its alienation, on the other – men have chosen the latter as the lesser evil. The state, whether represented by a supreme authority elected for the purpose, such as the Dutch States General, or by a despot, is the full possessor of the rights of all, because of the power of all. Every one is bound by his own interest to unconditional obedience, even if he should be commanded to deprive others of life; resistance is not only punishable, but contrary to reason. This supreme power is not controlled by any law. Whether exercised by an individual, as in a monarchy, or by several, as in a republic, it is justified in doing everything, and can do no wrong. But the state has supreme right not merely over actions of a civil nature, but also over spiritual and religious views; it could not exist, if everyone were at liberty to attack it under the pretext of religion. The government alone has the right to control religious affairs, and to define belief, unbelief, orthodoxy, and heresy. What a tyrannical conclusion! As this theory of Spinoza fails to recognize moral law, so it ignores steadfast fidelity. As soon as the government grows weak, it no longer has claim to obedience; everyone may renounce and resist it, to submit himself to the incoming power. According to this theory of civil and religious despotism, no one may have an opinion about the laws of the state, otherwise he is a rebel. Spinoza's theory almost does away with freedom, even of thought and opinion. Whoever speaks against a state ordinance in a fault-finding spirit, or to throw odium upon the government, or seeks to repeal a law against its express wish, should be regarded as a disturber of the public peace. Only through a sophistical quibble was Spinoza able to save freedom of thought and free expression of opinion. Every man has this right by nature, the only one which he has not transferred to the state, because it is essentially inalienable. It must be conceded to everyone to think and judge in opposition to the opinion of the government, even to speak and teach, provided this be done with reason and reflection, without fraud, anger, or malice, and without the intention of causing a revolution.

      On this weak basis, supported by a few other secondary considerations, Spinoza justified his conflict with Judaism and his philosophical attacks upon the sacred writings recognized by the Dutch States. He thought that he had succeeded in justifying himself before the magistrates sufficiently by his defense of freedom of thought. In the formulation of this apology it was apparent that he was not indifferent to the treatment which he had experienced from the college of rabbis. Spinoza was so filled with displeasure, if not with hatred, of Jews and Judaism, that his otherwise clear judgment was biased. He, like Da Costa, called the rabbis nothing but Pharisees, and imputed to them ambitious and degraded motives, while they wished only to secure their treasured beliefs against attacks. Prouder even than his contemporaries, the French and English philosophers, of freedom of thought, for centuries repressed by the church, and now soaring aloft the more powerfully, Spinoza summoned theology, in particular, ancient Judaism before the throne of reason, examined its dogmas and archives, and pronounced sentence of condemnation upon his mother-faith. He had erected a tower of thought in his brain from which, as it were, he wished to storm heaven. Spinoza's philosophy is like a fine net, laid before our eyes, mesh by mesh, by which the human understanding is unexpectedly ensnared, so that half voluntarily, half compulsorily, it surrenders. Spinoza recognized, as no thinker before, those universal laws, immutable as iron, which are apparent in the development of the most insignificant grain of seed no less than in the revolution of the heavenly bodies, in the precision of mathematical thought as in the apparent irregularity of human passions. Whilst these laws work with constant uniformity, and produce the same causes and the same phenomena in endless succession, the instruments of law are perishable things, creatures of a day, which rise, and vanish to give place to others: here eternity, there temporality; on the one side necessity, on the other chance; here reality, there delusive appearances. These and other enigmas Spinoza sought to solve with the penetration that betrays the son of the Talmud, and with logical consecutiveness and masterly arrangement, for which Aristotle might have envied him.

      The whole universe, all individual things, and their active powers are, according to Spinoza, not merely from God, but of God; they constitute the infinite succession of forms in which God reveals Himself, through which He eternally works according to His eternal nature – the soul, as it were, of thinking bodies, the body of the soul extended in space. God is the indwelling, not the external efficient cause of all things; all is in God and moves in God. God as creator and generator of all things is generative or self-producing nature. The whole of nature is animate, and ideas, as bodies, move in eternity on lines running parallel to or intersecting one another. Though the fullness of things which have proceeded from God and which exist in Him are not of an eternal, but of a perishable nature, yet they are not limited or defined by chance, but by the necessity of the divine nature, each in its own way existing or acting within its smaller or larger sphere. The eternal and constant nature of God works in them through the eternal laws communicated to them. Things could, therefore, not be constituted otherwise than they are; for they are the manifestations, entering into existence in an eternal stream, of God in the intimate connection of thought and extension.

      What is man's place in this logical system? How is he to act and work? Even he, with all his greatness and littleness, his strength and weakness, his heaven-aspiring mind, and his body subject to the need of sustenance, is nothing more than a form of existence (Modus) of God. Man after man, generation after generation, springs up and perishes, flows away like a drop in a perpetual stream, but his nature, the laws by which he moves bodily and mentally in the peculiar connection of mind and matter, reflect the Divine Being. Especially the human mind, or rather the various modes of thought, the feelings and conceptions of all men, form the eternal reason of God. But man is as little free as things, as the stone which rolls down from the mountain; he has to obey the causes which influence him from within and without. Each of his actions is the product of an infinite series of causes and effects, which he can scarcely discern, much less control and alter at will. The good man and the bad, the martyr who sacrifices himself for a noble object, as well as the execrable villain and the murderer, are all like clay in the hands of God; they act, the one well, the other ill, compelled by their inner nature. They all act from rigid necessity. No man can reproach God for having given him a weak nature or a clouded intellect, as it would be irrational if a circle should complain that God has not given it the nature and properties of the sphere. It is not the lot of every man to be strong-minded, and it lies as little in his power to have a sound mind as a sound body.

      On one side man is, to a certain extent, free, СКАЧАТЬ