o one now living will
deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to
produce some effect upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose
to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form
which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with
Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no
unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its
conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at
least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself
thoroughly understood.

And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to
see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have
claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was
necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have
called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man
like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something
reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott
trunkner Mann_--a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been
quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is
about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.
With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe
tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a
Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious,
methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty
years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world
in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as
attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort
after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in
philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions
and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the
conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the
grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has
given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione
Intellectus.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and
full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to
epitomise it.

Looking round him on his