nds are not at all
times equally able to exert themselves even on the same subject, but
depend on the state of their bodies? And as for experience proving
that the members of the body can be controlled by the mind, I fear
experience proves very much the reverse. But it is absurd (they
rejoin) to attempt to explain from the mere laws of body such things
as pictures, or palaces, or works of art; the body could not build a
church unless mind directed it. I have shown, however, that we do
not yet know what body can or cannot do, or what would naturally
follow from the structure of it; that we experience in the feats of
somnambulists something which antecedently to that experience would
have seemed incredible. This fabric of the human body exceeds
infinitely any contrivance of human skill, and an infinity of
things, as I have already proved, ought to follow from it.

We are not concerned to answer this reasoning, although if the matter
were one the debating of which could be of any profit, it would
undoubtedly have its weight, and would require to be patiently
considered. Life is too serious, however, to be wasted with impunity
over speculations in which certainty is impossible, and in which we are
trifling with what is inscrutable.

Objections of a far graver kind were anticipated by Spinoza himself,
when he went on to gather out of his philosophy 'that the mind of man
being part of the Infinite intelligence, when we say that such a mind
perceives this thing or that, we are, in fact, saying that God perceives
it, not as he is Infinite, but as he is represented by the nature of
this or that idea; and similarly, when we say that a man does this or
that action, we say that God does it, not _qua_ he is Infinite, but
_qua_ he is expressed in that man's nature.' 'Here,' he says, 'many
readers will no doubt hesitate, and many difficulties will occur to them
in the way of such a supposition.'

We confess that we ourselves are among these hesitating readers. As long
as the Being whom Spinoza so freely names remains surrounded with the
associations which in this country we bring with us out of our
childhood, not all the logic in the world would make us listen to
language such as this. It is not so--we know it, and that is enough. We
are well aware of the phalanx of difficulties which lie about our
theistic conceptions. They are quite enough, if religion depended on
speculative co