human beings: "Spiritual unhealthiness and misfortunes can generally be traced to excessive love
of something which is subject to many variations." But clear and distinct knowledge "begets a
love towards a thing immutable and eternal," and such love has not the turbulent and disquieting
character of love for an object which is transient and changeable.
Although personal survival after death is an illusion, there is nevertheless something in the human
mind that is eternal. The mind can only imagine or remember while the body endures, but there is
in God an idea which expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of eternity,
and this idea is the eternal part of the mind. The intellectual love of God, when experienced by an
individual, is contained in this eternal part of the mind.
Blessedness, which consists of love towards God, is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; we
do not rejoice in it because we control our lusts, but we control our lusts because we rejoice in it.
The Ethics ends with these words:
"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 labour be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all
excellent things are as difficult as they are rare."
In forming a critical estimate of Spinoza's importance as a philosopher, it is necessary to
distinguish his ethics from his metaphysics, and to consider how much of the former can survive
the rejection of the latter.
Spinoza's metaphysic is the best example of what may be called "logical monism"--the doctrine,
namely, that the world as a whole is a single substance, none of whose parts are logically capable
of existing alone. The ultimate basis for this view is the belief that every proposition has a single
subject and a single predicate, which leads us to the conclusion that relations and plurality must be
illusory. Spinoza thought that the nature of the world and of human life could be logi-