friends, in answer to their
question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'
All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without
absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are
contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius
scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est praeter ipsam essentiam
objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat
habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne
tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum
veritatis quaerere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est
via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiae objectivae rerum, aut ideae (omnia illa
idem significant) debito ordine quaerantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)

Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth
century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand
conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as
little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some
better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less
pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all
men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say
_is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of
conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We
are to see, however, what these _ideae_ are which are offered to us as
self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce
conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear
strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his
canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled
among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them,
in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_,
and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to
'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps,
be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of
the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--

DEFINITIONS.

1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing
the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which
cannot be conceived except as existing.

2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited