n deems good, and seeks
to gain, that which seems to him useful; all things belong to all, each may
destroy the objects of his hate. Conflict and insecurity prevail in the
state of nature as a result of the sensuous desires and emotions (_homines
ex natura hostes_); and they can be done away with only through the
establishment of a society, which by punitive laws compels everyone to do,
and leave undone, that which the general welfare demands. Strife and breach
of faith become sin only in the state; before its formation that alone was
wrong which no one had the desire and power to do. Besides this mission,
however, of protecting selfish interests by the prevention of aggression,
the civil community has a higher one, to subserve the development of
reason; it is only in the state that true morality and true freedom are
possible, and the wise man will prefer to live in the state, because
he finds more freedom there than in isolation. Thus the dislocation of
concepts, which is perceptible in Spinoza's ethics, repeats itself in his
politics. First, virtue is based on the impulse of self-preservation and
the good is equated with that which is useful to the individual; then, with
a transformation of mere utility into "true" utility, the rational moment
is brought in (first as practical prudence, next as the impulse after
knowledge, and then, with a gradual change of meaning, as moral wisdom),
until, finally, in strange contrast to the naturalistic beginning, the
Christian idea of virtue as purity, self-denial, love to our neighbors and
love to God, is reached. In a similar way "Spinoza conceives the starting
point of the state naturalistically, its culmination idealistically."[1]

[Footnote 1: C. Schindler in his dissertation _Ueber den Begriff des
Guten und Nuetzlichen bei Spinoza_, Jena, 1885, p. 42, a work, however,
which does not penetrate to the full depth of the matter. Cf. Eucken,
_Lebensanschauungen_, p. 406.]

The fundamental ideas of the Spinozistic system, and those which render
it important, are rationalism, pantheism, the essential identity of the
material and spiritual worlds, and the uninterrupted mechanism of becoming.
Besides the twisting of ethical concepts just mentioned, we may briefly
note the most striking of the other difficulties and contradictions which
Spinoza left unexplained. There is a break between his endeavor to exalt
the absolute high above the phenomenal world of individual existence, and,
at