de,
and founded upon our ignorance." He must find the freedom of the soul
then, if he find it at all, in one of its passive susceptibilities. This,
as we have already seen, is exactly what he does; he says the soul is free
in the affirmation that two and two are four! Thus he finds the liberty of
the soul, not in the exercises of its will, of its active power, but in
the bosom of the intelligence, which is absolutely necessitated in all its
determinations.

In this particular, as well as in most others, Spinoza merely reproduces
the error of the ancient Stoics. It was a principle with them, says
Ritter, "that the will and the desire are one with thought, and may be
resolved into it."(102) Thus, by the ancient Stoics, as well as by Hobbes,
and Spinoza, and Collins, and Edwards, the will is merged in one of the
passive elements of the mind, and its real characteristic lost sight of.
"By the freedom of the soul," says Ritter, "the Stoics understood simply
that assent which it gives to certain ideas."(103) Thus the ancient Stoics
endeavoured to find the freedom of the soul, where Spinoza and so many
modern necessitarians have sought to find it, in the passive, necessitated
states of the intelligence. This was indeed to impose upon themselves a
mere shadow for a substance,--a dream for a reality.

"By whatever name we call the act of the will," says Edwards, "choosing,
refusing, approving, disapproving, liking, disliking, embracing,
rejecting, determining, directing, commanding, forbidding, inclining or
being averse, being pleased or displeased with--all may be reduced to this
of choosing."(104) Thus, in the vocabulary and according to the psychology
of this great author, the phenomena of the sensibility and those of the
will are identified, as well as the faculties themselves. _Pleasing_ and
_willing_, liking and acting, are all one with him. His psychology admits
of no distinction, for example, between the pleasant impression made by an
apple on the sensibility, and the act of the will by which the hand is put
forth to take it. "The will and the affections of the soul," says he, "are
not two faculties; the affections are not essentially distinct from the
will, nor do they differ from the mere actings of the will and
inclination, but only in the liveliness and sensibility of exercise."(105)
And again, "I humbly conceive that the affections of the soul are not
properly distinguished from the will, as though there were two
f