" I
propose now, without attempting to connect or contrast Spinoza with
Descartes or the Germans, to name some of those thoughts in his books by
which he conceived he had attained his end.
The sorrow of life is the rigidity of the material universe in which we
are placed. We are bound by physical laws, and there is a constant
pressure of matter-of-fact evidence to prove that we are nothing but
common and cheap products of the earth to which in a few moments or
years we return. Spinoza's chief aim is to free us from this sorrow,
and to free us from it by THINKING. The emphasis on this word is
important. He continually insists that a thing is not unreal because we
cannot imagine it. His own science, mathematics, affords him examples
of what MUST be, although we cannot picture it, and he believes that
true consolation lies in the region of that which cannot be imaged but
can be thought.
Setting out on his quest, he lays hold at the very beginning on the idea
of Substance, which he afterwards identifies with the idea of God. "By
Substance I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through
itself; in other words, that, the conception of which does not need the
conception of another thing from which it must be formed.
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