mental and corporeal, are precisely parallel. For neither belongs to, or is part of, or is explained by, the other. Both, then, must be equally and independently expressions of God the substance. Hence, as each of the two orders expresses God's nature, each must be as omnipresent as the other. Wherever there is a body, God, says Spinoza, has a thought corresponding to that body. All nature is full of thought. Nothing exists but has its own mind, just as you have your mind. The more perfect body has, indeed, the more perfect mind; a crowbar is n't as thoughtful as a man, because in the simplicity of its metallic hardness it finds less food for thought.1 But, all the same, the meanest of God's creatures has some sort of thought attached to it, not indeed produced or affected in any wise by the corporeal nature of this thing, but simply parallel thereto; an expression, in cogitative or sentient terms, of the nature of the facts here present. Well, this thought is just as real an expression of the divine nature as is matter. There is just as much necessity, connection, completeness, mutual interdependence, rationality, eternity, in mind as in body. Of God's thought your thought is a part, just as your body is a part of the embodied substance. His thinking nature produces your ideas, as his corporeal nature produces your nerves. There is, however, no real influence of body over mind, or the reverse. The two are just parallel. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things. Just so far as your bodily life extends, so far and no further, in the mental world, extends your thought. You make nothing by your thinking but your own thoughts; but as your body is a part of nature, so also is your mind a part of the infinite mind. "I declare," says Spinoza, in a letter to a friend, "I declare the human mind to be a part of nature, namely, because I hold that

1 The illustration is my own. The thought is that of Eth. II. prop. xiii. and the scholium thereto.

in nature there exists an infinite power of thinking, which power, so far as it is infinite, contains ideally the whole of nature, in such wise that its thoughts proceed in the same fashion as nature herself, being, in fact, the ideal mirror thereof. Hence follows that I hold the human mind to be simply this same power (of divine thought), not so far as it is infinite and perceives the whole of nature, but as far as it perceives alone the human body; and thus I hold our human mind to be part of this infinite intellect."

VII.

I have thus led you a tedious way through this thorny path of Spinoza's thought. I have had no hope to make their connections all clear; I shall be content if you bear in mind this as the outcome: our reason perceives the world to be one being, whose law is everywhere and eternally expressed. Only this eternal point of view shows us the truth. But if we are rational, we can assume such an eternal point of view, can see God everywhere, and can so enter, not merely with mystical longings, but with a clear insight into an immediate communion with the Lord of all being. And this Lord, he is indeed the author of matter. The earth, the sea, yes, the very geometrical figures themselves write his truth in inanimate outward forms. But meanwhile (and herein lies the hope of our mystical religion) this substance, this deity, possesses and of its nature determines also and equally an infinite mind, of whose supreme perfection our minds are fragments. We are thus not only the sons of God; so far as we are wise our lives are hid in God, we are in Him, of Him; we recognize this indwelling, we lose our finiteness in Him, we become filled with the peace which the eternal brings; we calm the thirst of our helpless finite passion by entering consciously into his eternal self-possession

1 Nimirum ejus ideatum, the corrected reading of the Hague edi. tion of Van Vloten and Land. See Epist. xxxii. p. 130.

and freedom. For the true mind, like the true natural order, knows nothing of the bondage of time, thinks of no before and after, has no fortune, dreads nothing, laments nothing; but enjoys its own endlessness, its own completeness, has all things in all things, and so cries, like the lover of the "Imitation," "My Beloved, I am all thine, and thou art all mine."

In the fifth part of Spinoza's "Ethics," his own description of the wise man's love of God closes his wonderful exposition. This love is superior to fortune, renounces all hopes and escapes all fears, feeds alone on the thought that God's mind is the only mind, loves God with a fragment of "that very love wherewith God loves himself." The wise man thus wanders on earth in whatever state you will,- poor, an outcast, weak, near to bodily death; but "his meditation is not of death, but of life;" of the eternal life whereof he is a part, and has ever been and ever will be a part. You may bound him in a nut-shell, but he counts himself king of infinite space; and rightly, for the bad dreams of this phantom life have ceased to trouble him. "His blessedness," says Spinoza, "is not the reward of his virtue, but his virtue itself. He rejoices therein, not because he has controlled his lusts ; contrariwise, because he rejoices therein, the lusts of the finite have no power over him." "Thus appears how potent, then, is the wise man, and how much he surpasses the ignorant man, who is driven only by his lusts. For the ignorant man is not only distracted in various ways by external causes, without ever gaining true acquiescence of mind, but moreover lives, as it were, unwitting of himself and of God and of things, and, as soon as he ceases to suffer, ceases also to be. Whereas the wise man, in so far as he is regarded as such, is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but being conscious of himself and of God and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit.

If the way which I have pointed out as leading to this result seems exceedingly hard, it may, nevertheless, be discovered. Needs must it be hard since it is so seldom found. How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

With these words closes the book of Spinoza's experience.

LECTURE III.

THE REDISCOVERY OF THE INNER LIFE: FROM SPINOZA TO KANT.

In the lecture of to-day, as I must frankly assure you at the outset, our path lies for the most part in far less inspiring regions than those into which, at the last time, Spinoza guided us. You are well acquainted with a fact of life to which I may as well call your attention forthwith, the fact, namely, that certain stages of growing intelligence, and even of growing spiritual knowledge, are marked by an inevitable, and, at first sight, lamentable decline, in apparent depth and vitality of spiritual experience. The greatest concerns of our lives are, in such stages of our growth, somehow for a while hidden, even forgotten. We become more knowing, more clever, more critical, more wary, more skeptical, but we seemingly do not grow more profound or more reverent. We find in the world much that engages our curious attention; we find little that is sublime. Our world becomes clearer; a brilliant, hard, mid-morning light shines upon everything; but this light does not seem to us any longer divine. The deeper beauty of the universe fades out; only facts and problems are left.

Such a stage in human experience is represented, in great part, by the philosophical thinkers who flourish between the time of Spinoza's death, in 1677, and the appearance of Kant's chief philosophical work, "The Critique of Pure Reason," in 1781. It is the period which