by Will Durant
From the philosophers traditionally most admired he took little—though in his distinction between the world of passing things and the divine world of eternal laws we may find another form of Plato’s division between individual entities and their archetypes in the mind of God. Spinoza’s analysis of the virtues has been traced to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 180 But “the authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates,” he told a friend, “has not much weight with me.” 181 Like Bacon and Hobbes, he preferred Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. His ethical ideal may echo the Stoics; we hear in it some tones of Marcus Aurelius; but it was fully consistent with Epicurus.
He owed more to the Scholastic philosophers than he realized, for they came to him through the medium of Descartes. They too, like Thomas Aquinas in the great Summa, had attempted a geometrical exposition of philosophy. They gave him such terms as substantia, natura naturans, attributum, essentia, summum bonum, and many more. Their identification of existence and essence in God became his identification of existence and essence in substance. He extended to man their merger of intellect and will in God.
Perhaps (as Bayle thought) Spinoza read Bruno. He accepted Giordano’s distinction between natura naturans and naturanatur ata; he may have taken term and idea from Bruno’s conato de conservarsi; 182 he may have found in the Italian the unity of body and mind, of matter and spirit, of world and God, and the conception of the highest knowledge as that which sees all things in God—though the German mystics must have spread that view even into commercial Amsterdam.
More immediately, Descartes inspired him with philosophical ideals, and repelled him with theological platitudes. He was inspired by Descartes’ ambition to make philosophy march with Euclid in form and clarity. He probably followed Descartes in drawing up rules to guide his life and work. He adopted too readily Descartes’ notion that an idea must be true if it is “clear and distinct.” He accepted and universalized the Cartesian view of the world as a mechanism of cause and effect reaching from some primeval vortex right up to the pineal gland. He acknowledged his indebtedness to Descartes’ analysis of the passions. 183
The Leviathan of Hobbes, in Latin translation, obviously evoked much welcome in Spinoza’s thought. Here the conception of mechanism was worked out without mercy or fear. The mind, which in Descartes was distinct from the body and was endowed with freedom and immortality, became, in Hobbes and Spinoza, subject to universal law, and capable of only an impersonal immortality or none at all. Spinoza found in The Leviathan an acceptable analysis of sensation, perception, memory, and idea, and an unsentimental analysis of human nature. From the common starting point of a “state of nature” and a “social compact” the two thinkers came to contrary conclusions: Hobbes, from his royalist circles, to monarchy; Spinoza, from his Dutch patriotism, to democracy. Perhaps it was through Hobbes that the gentle Jew was led to Machiavelli; he refers to him as “that most acute Florentine,” and again as “that most ingenious . . . , foreseeing man.” 184 But he escaped the confusion of right with might, recognizing that this is forgivable only among individuals in the “state of nature,” and among states before the establishment of effective international law.
All these influences were tempered and molded by Spinoza into a structure of thought awe-inspiring in its apparent logic, harmony, and unity. There were cracks in the temple, as friends and enemies pointed out: Oldenburg ably criticized the opening axioms and propositions of the Ethics, 185 and Uberweg subjected them to a Germanically meticulous analysis. 186 The logic was brilliant, but perilously deductive; though based upon personal experience, it was an artistry of thought resting upon internal consistency rather than objective fact. Spinoza’s trust in his reasoning (though what other guide could he have?) was his sole immodesty. He expressed his confidence that man can understand God, or essential reality and universal law; he repeatedly avowed his conviction that he had proved his doctrines beyond all question or obscurity; and sometimes he spoke with an assurance unbecoming in a spray of foam analyzing the sea. What if all logic is an intellectual convenience, a heuristic tool of the seeking mind, rather than the structure of the world? So the inescapable logic of determinism reduces consciousness (as Huxley confessed) to an epiphenomenon—an apparently superfluous appendage of psychophysical processes which, by the mechanics of cause and effect, would go on just as well without it; and yet nothing seems more real, nothing more impressive, than consciousness. After logic has had its say, the mystery, tam grande secretum, remains.
These difficulties may have shared in the unpopularity of Spinoza’s philosophy in the first century after his death; but resentment was more violently directed against his critique of the Bible, prophecies, and miracles, and his conception of God as lovable but impersonal and deaf. The Jews thought of their son as a traitor to his people; the Christians cursed him as a very Satan among philosophers, an Antichrist who sought to rob the world of all meaning, mercy, and hope. Even the heretics condemned him. Bayle was repelled by Spinoza’s view that all things and all men are modes of the one and only substance, cause, or God; then, said Bayle, God is the real agent of all actions, the real cause of all evil, all crimes and wars; and when a Turk slays a Hungarian it is God slaying Himself; this, Bayle protested (forgetting the subjectivity of evil) was a “most absurd and monstrous hypothesis.” 187 Leibniz was for a decade (1676–86) strongly influenced by Spinoza. The doctrine of monads as centers of psychic force may owe something to omnia quodammodo animata. At one time Leibniz declared that only one feature of Spinoza’s philosophy offended him—the rejection of final causes, or providential design, in the cosmic process. 188 When the outcry against Spinoza’s “atheism” became universal, Leibniz joined in it as part of his own conatus sese preservandi.
Spinoza had a modest, almost a concealed, share in generating the French Enlightenment. The leaders of that combustion used Spinoza’s Biblical criticism as a weapon in their war against the Church, and they admired his determinism, his naturalistic ethic, his rejection of design in nature. But they were baffled by the religious terminology and apparent mysticism of the Ethics. We can imagine the reaction of Voltaire or Diderot, of Helvétius or d’Holbach, to such statements as “The mental intellectual love towards God is the very love of God with which God loves himself.” 189
The German spirit was more responsive to this side of Spinoza’s thought. According to a conversation (1780) reported by Friedrich Jacobi, Lessing not only confessed that he had been a Spinozist through all his mature life, but affirmed that “there is no other philosophy than Spinoza’s.” 190 It was precisely the pantheistic identification of nature and God that thrilled the Germany of the romantic movement after the Aufklärung under Frederick the Great had run its course. Jacobi, champion of the new Gefühlsphilosophie, was among the first defenders of Spinoza (1785); it was another German romantic, Novalis, who called Spinoza “der Gottbetrunkene Mensch”; Herder thought that he had found in the Ethics the reconciliation of religion and philosophy; and Schleiermacher, the liberal theologian, wrote of “the holy and excommunicated Spinoza.” 191 The young Goethe was “converted” (he tells us) at his first reading of the Ethics; henceforth Spinozism pervaded his (nonsexual) poetry and prose; it was partly by breathing the calm air of the Ethics that he grew out of the wild romanticism of Götz von Berlichingen and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers to the Olympian poise of his later life. Kant interrupted this stream of influence for a while; but Hegel professed that “to be a philosopher one must first be a Spinozist”; and he rephrased Spinoza’s God as “Absolute Reason.” Probably something of Spinoza’s conatus sese preservandi entered into Schopenhauer’s “will to live” and Nietzsche’s “will to power.”
England for a century knew Spinoza chiefly through hearsay, and denounced him as a distant and terrible ogre. Stillingfleet (1677) referred to him vaguely as “a late author [who] I hear is mightily in vogue among many who cry up anything on the atheistical side.” A Scottish professor, George Sinclair (1685), wrote
of “a monstrous rabble of men who, following the Hobbesian and Spinosian principle, slight religion and undervalue the Scripture.” Sir John Evelyn (1690?) spoke of the Tractatus theologico-politicus as “that infamous book,” a “wretched obstacle to the searchers of holy truth.” Berkeley (1732), while ranking Spinoza among “weak and wicked writers,” thought him “the great leader of our modern infidels.” 192 As late as 1739 the agnostic Hume shuddered cautiously at the “hideous hypothesis” of “that famous atheist,” the “universally infamous Spinoza.” 193 Not till the romantic movement at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century did Spinoza really reach the English mind. Then he, more than any other philosopher, inspired the youthful metaphysics of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron. Shelley quoted the Tractatus theologico-politicus in the original notes to Queen Mab, and began a translation of it, for which Byron pledged a preface; a fragment of this version came into the hands of an English critic, who, taking it for a work by Shelley himself, called it a “schoolboy speculation . . . too crude for publication entire.” George Eliot translated the Ethics with virile resolution, and James Froude 194 and Matthew Arnold 195 acknowledged the influence of Spinoza on their mental development. Of all the intellectual products of man, religion and philosophy seem to endure the longest. Pericles is famous because he lived in the days of Socrates.
We love Spinoza especially among the philosophers because he was also a saint, because he lived, as well as wrote, philosophy. The virtues praised by the great religions were honored and embodied in the outcast who could find a home in none of the religions, since none would let him conceive God in terms that science could accept. Looking back upon that dedicated life and concentrated thought, we feel in them an element of nobility that encourages us to think well of mankind. Let us admit half of the terrible picture that Swift drew of humanity; let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair.
CHAPTER XXIII
Leibniz
1646–1716
I. THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW
A CHASM of character and thought separates Spinoza from Leibniz. The solitary Jew, cast out by Judaism, not accepting Christianity, living in poverty in an attic room, finishing only two books, slowly evolving a boldly original philosophy that would alienate all the religions, and dying of consumption at forty-four; the German man of the world, busy with statesmen and courts, traveling through nearly all of Western Europe, spreading his feelers into Russia and China, accepting both Protestantism and Catholicism, welcoming and using a dozen systems of thought, writing half a hundred treatises, embracing God and the world with desperate optimism, living out his threescore years and ten, and resembling his predecessor only in the loneliness of his funeral: here in one generation are the antipodes of modern philosophy.
But before we come to this protean mosaic of a man, let us acknowledge some minor credits to German thought. Samuel von Pufendorf began his trajectory in 1632, in the same year as Spinoza and Locke. After studying at Leipzig and Jena he went to Copenhagen as tutor in the family of a Swedish diplomat; was arrested with him when Sweden declared war upon Denmark; and tempered the tedium of imprisonment by constructing a system of international law. Released, he moved to Leiden, where he published the results as Elementa Jurisprudentiae universalis (1661), which so pleased Charles Louis of the Palatinate (the same who later invited Spinoza) that the Elector called him to Heidelberg, and created for him a professorship in natural and international law—the first such chair in history. There Pufendorf composed a study of the German realm, De Statu Imperii Germanici, Liber Unus (1667), which shocked Leopold I by attacking the Holy Roman Empire and its emperors. Pufendorf migrated to Sweden and the University of Lund (1670), where he published his chef d’oeuvre, De lure Naturae et Gentium (1672). Attempting to mediate between Hobbes and Grotius, Pufendorf identified the “law of nature” not with the “war of each against all,” but with the dictates of “right reason.” He extended “natural rights” (rights belonging to all rational beings) to Jews and Turks, and argued that international law should hold not only among Christian states, but equally in their relations with “infidels.” He preceded Jean Jacques Rousseau by almost a century in declaring that the will of the state is, and should be, the sum of the wills of its constituent individuals; but he thought slavery desirable as a way of reducing the number of beggars, tramps and thieves. 1
Some Swedish pastors thought these theories made too little account of God and the Bible in political philosophy; they urged that Pufendorf be returned to Germany; but Charles XI called him to Stockholm and made him historiographer royal. The professor repaid him by writing a biography of the King and a history of Sweden. In 1687, perhaps with an eye to travel, Pufendorf dedicated to the Great Elector of Brandenburg a treatise on the relation of the Christian religion to civil life (De Habitu christianae Religionis ad Vitam civilem), defending toleration. He soon accepted a call to Berlin, became historiographer to Frederick William, was made a baron, and died (1694). His writings remained for half a century the dominant works in political and legal philosophy in Protestant Europe, and their realistic analysis of social relations helped events to deflate the theory of the divine right of kings.
The decline in the theological interpretation of human affairs was accentuated by the careers of Balthasar Bekker and Christian Thomasius. Bekker was a Dutch pastor ministering to a flock in Friesland. Having spoiled his faith with Descartes, he proposed to apply reason to Scripture. He interpreted Biblical devils as popular delusions or metaphors; he traced the pre-Christian history of the idea of Satan, held it an interpolation into Christianity, concluded that the Devil was a myth, and blasted him out of existence in a Dutch manifesto, De betooverte Wereld (The Bedeviled World, 1691). The Church severely censured Bekker, feeling that fear of the Devil is the beginning of wisdom. The Devil suffered some loss in prestige, but not in devotees.
Thomasius carried on the battle. While continuing to accept the Scriptures as a guide to religion and salvation, he aspired to follow the rule of reason, to believe only up to the evidence, and to encourage religious toleration. As professor of natural law at Leipzig (1684–90), he offended the faculty and the ministry by the originality of his views, methods, and language. He countered the superstitions of his time with lusty German laughter; he agreed with Bekker in exorcizing the Devil from religion; he denounced the belief in witchcraft as shameful ignorance, and the persecution of “witches” as criminal brutality; through his influence trials for sorcery were ended in Germany. To make matters worse, he lectured his students in German instead of Latin, taking half the dignity out of pedagogy. In 1688 he began to pubish a periodical review of books and ideas; we should have called it the first serious journal in German, but it took its erudition with a light heart, coated scholarship with humor, and called itself Scherzhafte und ernsthafte, vernünftige und einfältige Gedanken über allerhand lustige und nützliche Bücher und Fragen (Jocose and Earnest, Rational and Silly Thoughts on All Kinds of Pleasant and Useful Books and Questions). His defense of the Pietists against the orthodox clergy, and of intermarriage between Lutherans and Calvinists, so alarmed the authorities that they forbade him to write or lecture, and finally ordered his arrest (1690). He escaped to Berlin; the Elector Frederick III gave him a professorship at Halle; he took part in organizing the university there, and soon made it the liveliest intellectual center in Germany. In 1709 Leipzig invited him to return; he refused, an
d remained at Halle thirty-four years, to the end of his life. He inaugurated the Aufklärung which produced Lessing and Frederick the Great.
Some of the enthusiasts pushed their revolt to the extremes of atheism. Matthias Knutzen of Holstein discarded all supernatural belief; “insuper Deum negamus”—above all we deny God. 2 He proposed to replace Christianity, its churches, and its priests with a positivist “religion of humanity” in full anticipation of Auguste Comte, and to base morality solely on the naturalistic education of conscience (1674). He claimed seven hundred followers; this was probably an exaggeration; but we observe that between 1662 and 1713 at least twenty-two works were published in Germany aiming to spread or refute atheism. 3
Leibniz deplored “the apparent triumph of freethinkers.” “In our day,” he wrote, toward 1700, “many people have scant respect for Revelation . . . or miracles.” 4 And he added, in 1715: “Natural religion is growing very much weaker. Many hold that souls are corporeal; others that God Himself is corporeal. Mr. Locke and his followers are doubtful whether souls are not material and naturally perishable.” 5 Leibniz was not too firm in his own faith; but as a man of the world and its courts, he wondered where the rising rationalism would end, and what it would do to churches, morals, and thrones. Could the rationalists be answered in their own terms, and the faith of the fathers be rescued for the health of the children?
II. WANDERJAHRE
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was two years old when the Thirty Years’ War ended; he grew up in one of the most barren and unhappy periods of German history. But he had every educational opportunity then available, for his father was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig. Gottfried was a Wunderkind, eager for knowledge and in love with books. The paternal library was opened to him with the invitation “Tolle, lege” (Take and read). He began Latin at eight, Greek at twelve; he devoured history; he became a “polymath”—learned in many fields. At fifteen he entered the university, where the stimulating Thomasius was one of his teachers. At twenty he applied for the doctor’s degree in law; Leipzig refused it because of his youth, but he received it soon afterward from Nuremberg’s university at Altdorf. His doctoral dissertation there made such an impression that he was at once offered a professorship. He declined, saying that he had “different things in view.” Very few of the major philosophers have held university chairs.
