for if Greece, from the first, realized the ideal of poetry, of science, of philosophy, of art, of profane life, if I may so speak, the Jewish people has made the religion of humanity. Its prophets inaugurated in the world the idea of righteousness, the revindication of the rights of the weak-a revindication so much the more violent that, all idea of future recompense being unknown to them, they dreamed of the realization of the ideal upon this earth and at no distant period. It was a Jew, Isaiah, who, seven hundred and fifty years before Jesus Christ, dared affirm that sacrifices are of little importance, and that one thing only is needful, purity of heart and hands. Then, when earthly events seemed irremediably to contradict such bright Utopias, Israel can change front in a way unparalleled.

Transporting into the domain of pure idealism that kingdom of God with which earth proves incompatible, one moiety of its children founds Christianity, the other carries on, through the tortures of the middle ages, that imperturbable protest: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one; holy is his name." This potent tradition of idealism and hope against all hope-this religion, able to obtain from its adherents the most heroic sacrifices, though it be not of its essence to promise them any certainty beyond this life-this was the healthy and bracing medium in which Spinoza developed himself. His education was at first entirely Hebraic; the great literature of Israel was his earliest, and, in point of fact, his perpetual instructress-was the meditation of all his life.

As generally happens, Hebrew literature, in assuming the character of a sacred book, had become the subject of a conventional exegesis, much less intent upon explaining the old texts according to the meaning in their authors' minds than on finding in them aliment for the moral and religious wants of the day. The penetrating mind of the young Spinoza soon discerned all the defects of the exegesis of the Synagogue; the Bible, as taught him, was disfigured by the accumulated perversions of more than two thousand years. He determined to pierce beyond these. He was, indeed, essentially at one with the true fathers of Judaism, and especially with that great Maimonides who found a way of introducing into Judaism the most daring speculations of philosophy. He foresaw with wondrous sagacity the great results of the critical exegesis destined a hundred and twenty-five years later to afford the true meaning of the noblest productions of Hebrew genius. Was this to destroy the Bible? Has that admirable literature lost by being understood in its real aspect rather than relegated outside of the common laws of humanity? Certainly not. The truths revealed by science invariably surpass the dreams that science dispels. The world of Laplace exceeds in beauty I

imagine, that of a Cosmas Indicopleustes, who pictured the universe to himself as a casket on the lid of which the stars glide along in grooves at a few leagues from us. In the same way the Bible is more beautiful when we have learnt to see therein-ranged in order on a canvas of a thousand years-each aspiration, each sigh, each prayer of the most exalted religious consciousness that ever existed, than when we force ourselves to view it as a book unlike any other, composed, preserved, interpreted in direct opposition to all the ordinary rules of the human intellect.

But the persecutions of the middle ages had produced on Judaism the usual effect of all persecution; they had rendered minds narrow and timid. A few years previously, at Amsterdam, the unfortunate Uriel Acosta had cruelly expiated certain doubts that fanaticism finds as culpable as avowed incredulity. The boldness of the young Spinoza was still worse received; he was anathematized, and had to submit to an excommunication that he had not courted. A very old history this! Religious communions, beneficent cradles of so much earnestness and so much virtue, do not allow of any refusal to be shut up exclusively within their embrace; they claim to imprison for ever the life that had its beginnings within them; they brand as apostasy the lawful emancipation of the mind that seeks to take its flight alone. It is as though the egg should reproach, as ungrateful, the bird that had escaped therefrom: the egg was necessary in its time,-when it became a bondage it had to be broken. A great marvel truly that Erasmus of Rotterdam should feel himself cramped in his cell, that Luther should not prefer his monkish vows to that far holier vow which man by the very fact of his being contracts with truth. Had Erasmus persisted in his monastic routine, or Luther gone on distributing indulgences, they would have been apostates indeed. Spinoza was the greatest of modern Jews, and Judaism exiled him: nothing more simple; it must have been so, it must be so ever. Finite symbols, prisons of the infinite spirit, will eternally protest against the effort of Idealism to enlarge them. The spirit on its side struggles eternally for more air and more light. Eighteen hundred and fifty years ago the Synagogue denounced as a seducer the one who was to raise the maxims of the Synagogue to unequalled glory. And the Christian Church, how often has she not driven from her breast those who should have been her chiefest honour! In cases like these our duty is fulfilled if we retain a pious memory of the education our childhood received. Let the old Churches be free to brand with criminality those who quit them; they shall not succeed in obtaining from us any but grat lings, since, after all, the harm they ompared to the good they have

II.

Here then we have the excommunicated of the synagogue of Amsterdam forced to create for himself a spiritual abode outside of the home which rejected him. He had great sympathy with Christianity, but he dreaded all chains, he did not embrace it. Descartes had just renewed philosophy by his firm and sober rationalism. Descartes was his master; Spinoza took up the problems where they had been left by that great mind, but saw that through fear of the Sorbonne his theology had always remained somewhat arid. Oldenburg asking him one day what fault he could find with the philosophy of Descartes and of Bacon, Spinoza replied that their chief fault lay in not sufficiently occupying themselves with the First Cause. Perhaps his reminiscences of Jewish theology, that ancient wisdom of the Hebrews before which he often bows, suggested to him higher views, and more sublime aspirations in this matter. Not only the ideas held by the vulgar, but those even of thinkers on Divinity, appeared to him inadequate. He saw plainly that there is no assigning a limited part to the Infinite, that Divinity is all, or is nothing; that if the Divine be a reality it must pervade all. For twenty years he meditated on these problems without for a moment averting his thoughts. Our distaste nowadays for system and abstract formula no longer permits us to accept absolutely the propositions within which he had thought to confine the secrets of the Infinite. For Spinoza, as for Descartes, the universe was only extension and thought; chemistry and physiology were lacking to that great school, which was too exclusively geometrical and mechanical. A stranger to the idea of life, and those notions as to the constitution of bodies that chemistry was destined to reveal-too much attached still to the scholastic expressions of substance and attribute-Spinoza did not attain to that living and fertile Infinite shown us by the science of nature and of history as presiding in space unbounded, over a development more and more intense; but, making allowance for a certain dryness in expression, what grandeur there is in that inflexible geometrical deduction leading up to the supreme proposition: "It is of the nature of the Substance to develop itself necessarily by an infinity of infinite attributes infinitely modified!" God is thus absolute thought, universal consciousness. The ideal exists, nay, it is the true existence; all else is mere appearance and frivolity. Bodies and souls are mere modes of which God is the substance; it is only the modes that fall within duration, the substance is all in eternity. Thus, God does not prove himself, his existence results from his sole idea; everything supposes and contains him. God is the condition of all existence, all thought. If God did not

exist, thought would be able to conceive more than nature could furnish, which is a contradiction.

Spinoza did not clearly discern universal progress; the world, as he conceives it, seems as it were crystallized in a matter which is incorruptible extension, in a soul that is immutable thought; the sentiment of God deprives him of the sentiment of man; for ever face to face with the Infinite, he did not sufficiently perceive what of the Divine conceals itself in relative manifestations; but he, better than any other, saw the eternal identity which constitutes the basis of all transitory evolutions. Whatever is limited seems to him frivolous and unworthy to occupy a philosopher. Bold in flight, he soared straight to the lofty snow-covered summits, without casting a glance on the rich display of life springing up on the mountain's side. At an altitude where every breast but his own pants hard, he lives, he enjoys, he flourishes there as men in general do in mild and temperate regions. What he for his part needs is the glacier air, keen and penetrating. He does not ask to be followed; he is like Moses, to whom secrets unknown to the crowd reveal themselves on the heights; but be sure of this-he was the seer of his age, he was in his own day the one who saw deepest into God.

III.

It might have been supposed that, all alone on those snowy peaks, he would turn out in human affairs wrong-headed, utopian, or scornfully sceptical. Nothing of the kind. He was incessantly occupied with the application of his principles to human society. The pessimism of Hobbes and the dreams of Thomas More were equally repugnant to him. One-half at least of the "TheologicoPolitical Treatise" which appeared in 1670, might be reprinted to-day without losing any of its appropriateness. Listen to its admirable title:"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, continens dissertationes aliquot, quibus ostenditur, libertatem philosophandi non tantum salva pietate et reipublicæ pace posse concedi, sed eamdem nisi cum pace reipublicæ ipsaque pietate tolli non posse." For centuries past it had been supposed that society rested on metaphysical dogmas. Spinoza discerns profoundly that these dogmas, assumed to be necessary to humanity, yet cannot escape discussion; that revelation itself, if there be one, traversing, in order to reach us, the faculties of the human mind, is no less than all else amenable to c. I wish I could quote in its entirety that admirable Chapt which our great publicist establishes na-new then, and still contested itserty of conscience.

ts not in dominating over

men, restraining them by fears, subjecting them to the will of others, but, on the contrary, in permitting each one to live in all possible security; that is to say, in preserving intact the natural right of each to live without injury to himself or others. No, I say, the State has not for its end the transformation of men from reasonable beings into animals or automata; it has for end so to act that its citizens should in security develop soul and body, and make free use of their reason. Hence the true end of the State is liberty. Whosoever means to respect the rights of a sovereign should never act in opposition to his decrees; but each has the right to think what he will, and to say what he thinks, provided he content himself with speaking and teaching in the name of pure reason, and do not attempt on his private authority to introduce innovations into the State. For example, a citizen who demonstrates that a certain law is repugnant to sound reason, and holds that for that cause it ought to be abrogated-if he submit his opinions to the judgment of the sovereign, to whom alone it belongs to establish and to abolish laws, and if meanwhile he acts in no wise contrary to law that man certainly deserves well of the State as the best of citizens.

"Even if we admit the possibility of so stifling men's liberty, and laying such a yoke upon them that they dare not even whisper without the approbation of the sovereign, never most surely can they be prevented from thinking as they will. What then must ensue? That men will think one way and speak another; that consequently good faith-a virtue most necessary to the State-will become corrupted; that adulation-a detestable thing-and perfidy will be had in repute, entailing the decadence of all good and healthy morality. What can be more disastrous to a State than to exile honest citizens as evil-doers because they do not share the opinions of the crowd and are ignorant of the art of feigning? What more fatal than to treat as enemies and doom to death men whose only crime is that of thinking independently? The scaffold, which should be the terror of the wicked, is thus turned into the glorious theatre where virtue and toleration shine out in all their lustre, and publicly cover the sovereign majesty with opprobrium. Beyond question there is only one thing to be learnt from such a spectacle-to imitate those noble martyrs; or if one fears death, to become the cowardly flatterers of power. Nothing, then, is so full of peril as to refer and submit to divine rights matters of pure speculation, and to impose laws on opinions which are, or may be, subjects of discussion among men. If the authority of the State limited itself to the repression of actions while allowing impunity to words, controversies would less often turn into seditions."

More sagacious than many so-called practical men, our speculator sees perfectly well that the only durable Governments are the reasonable, and that the only reasonable Governments are the constitutional. Far from absorbing the individual in the State, he gives him solid guarantees against the State's omnipotence. He is no revolutionary, but a moderate; he transforms, explains, but does not destroy. His God is not indeed one who takes pleasure in ceremonies, sacrifices, odour of incense, yet Spinoza has no design whatever to overthrow religion; he entertains a profound veneration for Christianity, a tender and a sincere respect. The supernatural, however, has no meaning in his doctrine. According to his principles anything out of nature would be out of being and therefore inconceivable. Prophets, revealers, have been men like others —