memory, the
senses, whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish necessarily
and eternally; and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations,
who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession of himself, having
in life possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance of it
with the dissolution of the body.

Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the essence of the
mind, united to the mind as the mind is united to the body, and thus
there is in the soul something of an everlasting nature which cannot
utterly perish. And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most
solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his
demonstrations, and appeals to the consciousness. In spite of our
non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in spite of all
difficulties from the dissolution of the body, 'Nihilominus,' he says,
'sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse. Nam mens non minus res illas
sentit quas intelligendo concipit, quam quas in memoria habet. Mentis
enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ipsae demonstrationes.'

This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls into easy
harmony with the rest of the system. As the mind is not a faculty, but
an act or acts,--not a power of perception, but the perception itself,
in its high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical
language which Coleridge has made popular and partially intelligible),
the object and the subject become one. If knowledge be followed as it
ought to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded in their
relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge of particular outward
things, of nature, or life, or history, becomes, in fact, knowledge of
God; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more the mind
is raised above what is perishable in the phenomena to the idea or law
which lies beyond them. It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal,
not upon the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting
laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with them, it
contracts in itself the character of the objects which possess it. Thus
we are emancipated from the conditions of duration; we are liable even
to death only _quatenus patimur_, as we are passive things and not
active intelligences; and the more we possess such knowledge and are
possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is superseded by the
active--so that at last the human soul may 'b