his church, and the edict of the state. But should
it be a matter of surprise to us that some of the links of those broken
chains should still hang on the young philosopher, and, seeming to be a
part of himself, almost imperceptibly incline to old ways of thinking,
and to old modes of utterance of those thoughts! Wonder not that a few
links bang about him, but rather that he ever succeeded in breaking
those chains at all. Spinoza, after his secession from his synagogue,
became logically an Atheist; education and early impressions enlarged
this into a less clearly-defined Pantheism; but the logic comes to
us naked, disrobed of all by which it might have been surrounded in
Spinoza's mind. If that logic be correct, then all the theologies of
the world are false. We have presented it to the reader to judge of
for himself. Many men have written against it; of these some have
misunderstood, some have misrepresented, some have failed, and few have
left us a proof that they had endeavored to deal with Spinoza on his own
ground. Maccall says, "In the glorious throng of heroic names, there
are few nobler than Spinoza's. Apart altogether from the estimate we may
form of his philosophy, there is something unspeakably interesting in
the life and the character of the man. In his metaphysical system there
are two things exceedingly distinct. There is, first, the immense
and prodigious, but terrible mathematical skeleton, which his subtle
intellect binds up and throws as calmly into space as we drop a pebble
into the water, and whose bones, striking against the wreck of all that
is sacred in belief, or bold in speculation, rattle a wild response to
our wildest phantasies, and drive us almost to think in despair that
thinking is madness; and there is, secondly, the divinest vision of the
infinite, and the divinest incense which the intuition of the infinite
ever yet poured forth at the altar of creation."

The "Treatise on Politics" is not Spinoza's greatest work; it is, in
all respects, inferior to the "Ethics," and to the "Theologico-Political
Treatise." But there are in politics certain eternal principles, and it
is for setting forth and elucidating these that the Treatise of Spinoza
is so valuable.

In the second chapter of that Treatise, after defining what he means by
nature, etc., he, on the sixth section, proceeds as follows:--"But many
believe that the ignorant disturb more than follow the order of nature,
and conceive of men