ly termed grammar.

The principle _ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis_, forms the connection
between the occasionalistic metaphysics and ethics, the latter deducing the
practical consequences of the former. Where thou canst do nothing, there
will nothing. Since we can effect nothing in the material world, to which
we are related merely as spectators, we ought also not to seek in it the
motives and objects of our actions. God, does not require works, but
dispositions only, for the result of our volition is beyond our power. Our
moral vocation, then, consists in renunciation of the world and retirement
into ourselves, and in patient faithfulness at the post assigned to us.
Virtue is _amor dei ac rationis_, self-renouncing, active, obedient love
to God and to the reason as the image and law of God in us. The cardinal
virtues are _diligentia_, sedulous listening for the commands of the
reason; _obedientia_, the execution of these _justitia_, the conforming of
the whole life to what is perceived to be right; finally, _humilitas_,
the recognition of our impotency and self-renunciation (_inspectio_ and
_despectio_, or _derelictio, neglectus, contemptus, incuria sui_). The
highest of these is humility, pious submission to the divine order of
things; its condition, the self-knowledge commended in the title of the
Ethics; the primal evil, self-love (_Philautia_--_ipsissimum peccatum_).
Man is unhappy because he seeks happiness. Happiness is like our shadows;
it shuns us when we pursue it, it follows us when we flee from it. The joys
which spring from virtue are an adornment of it, not an enticement to it;
they are its result, not its aim. The ethics of Geulincx, which we cannot
further trace out here, surprises one by its approximation to the views of
Spinoza and of Kant. With the former it has in common the principle of love
toward God, as well as numerous details; with the latter, the absoluteness
of the moral law (_in rebus moralibus absolute praecipit ratio aut vetat,
nulla interposita conditione_); with both the depreciation of sympathy, on
the ground that it is a concealed egoistic motive.

The denial of substantiality to individual things, brought in by the
occasionalists, is completed by Spinoza, who boldly and logically proclaims
pantheism on the basis of Cartesianism and gives to the divine All-one a
naturalistic instead of a theological character.

%2. Spinoza.%

Benedictus (originally Baruch) de Spinoza sprang from