ecome of such a nature that
the portion of it which will perish with the body in comparison with
that of it which shall endure, shall be insignificant and _nullius
momenti_.' (Eth. v. 38.)

Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which
upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate. The
account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's
labours; his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' was the forerunner of
German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the
application of principles laid down in that remarkable work. But this is
not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, we have cared to
enter. We have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most
associated with the name of its author. It is this which has been really
powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine
themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism
of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and
Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has formed the strong,
shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with
the theories of the most extreme materialism.

It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good),
at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has
caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired
Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an
instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the
lessons of nature; the sense of that 'something' interfused in the
material world--

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;--
A motion and a spirit, which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an
actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere
denial that it is this. We go on to ask what it _is_, and we are obliged
to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once
a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made, we are
really and truly studying a revelation of himself.

It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral
side, that the stumbling-block is lying; in that