nsistency, and not in obedience of life, to perplex and
terrify us. What are we? what _is_ anything? If it be not divine--what
is it then? If created--out of what is it created? and how created--and
why? These questions, and others far more momentous which we do not
enter upon here, may be asked and cannot be answered; but we cannot any
the more consent to Spinoza on the ground that he alone consistently
provides an answer; because, as we have said again and again, we do not
care to have them answered at all. Conscience is the single tribunal to
which we choose to be referred, and conscience declares imperatively
that what he says is not true. It is painful to speak of all this, and
as far as possible we designedly avoid it. Pantheism is not Atheism, but
the Infinite Positive and the Infinite Negative are not so remote from
one another in their practical bearings; only let us remember that we
are far indeed from the truth if we think that God to Spinoza was
_nothing else_ but that world which we experience. It is but one of
infinite expressions of him--a conception which makes us giddy in the
effort to realise it.

We have arrived at last at the outwork of the whole matter in its
bearings upon life and human duty. It was in the search after this last,
that Spinoza, as we said, travelled over so strange a country, and we
now expect his conclusions. To discover the true good of man, to direct
his actions to such ends as will secure to him real and lasting
felicity, and, by a comparison of his powers with the objects offered to
them, to ascertain how far they are capable of arriving at these
objects, and by what means they can best be trained towards them--is the
aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy. 'Most people,' he adds, 'deride
or vilify their nature; it is a better thing to endeavour to understand
it; and however extravagant my proceeding may be thought, I propose to
analyse the properties of that nature as if it were a mathematical
figure.' Mind being, as he conceives himself to have shown, nothing else
than the idea corresponding to this or that affection of body, we are
not, therefore, to think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an
act. There is no general power called intellect, any more than there is
any general abstract volition, but only _hic et ille intellectus et haec
et illa volitio_.

Again, by the word Mind is understood not merely an act or acts of will
or intellect, but all forms also of co