entrance into life, and asking himself what was
his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men,
and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all
in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of
what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting
on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the
experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were
all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and
the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as
it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one
time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the
wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He
desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to
find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We
must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out
of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare
facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as
the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to
find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all
forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the
certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at
all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative
method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which
were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these
_verae ideae_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If
they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be
self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the
illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious
and Platonic.

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require
others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture
those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,
and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has
provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude
instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and
others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with
the mind; there must be s