lines
and surfaces in mathematics, I determined not to laugh or to weep over
the actions of men, but simply to understand them; and to contemplate
their affections and passions, such as love, hate, anger, envy,
arrogance, pity and all other disturbances of soul not as vices of
human nature, but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as
heat, cold, storm, thunder pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.
For these, though troublesome, are yet necessary, and have certain
causes through which we may come to understand them, and thus, by
contemplating them in their truth, gain for our minds as much joy as
by the knowledge of things that are pleasing to the senses." All our
errors as to the nature of things arise from our judging them from the
point of view of the part and not of the whole, from appoint of view
determined by their relation to our own individual being, and not from
a point of view determined by the nature of the things themselves; or,
to put the same thing in another way, from the point of view of sense
and imagination, and not from the point of view of intelligence.
Mathematics shows us the inadequacy of such knowledge when it takes us
out of ourselves into things, and when it presents these things to us
as objects of universal intelligence apart from all special relation
to our individual feelings. And Spinoza only wishes that the same
universality and freedom of thought which belongs to mathematics,
because its objects _do not_ interest the passions, should be extended
to those objects that _do_ interest them. Purity from interest is the
first condition of the philosopher's being; he must get beyond the
illusion of sense and passion that makes our own lives so supremely
important and interesting to us simply because they are our own. He
must look at the present as it were through an inverted telescope of
reason, that will reduce it to its due proportion and place in the sum
of things. To the heat of passion and the higher heat of imagination,
Spinoza has only one advice--"Acquaint yourself with God and be at
peace." Look not to the particular but to the universal, view things
not under the form of the finite and temporal, but _sub quadam specie
aeternitatis._

Sense the source of error.

The illusion of the finite--the illusion of sense, imagination and
passion, which, in Bacon's language, tends to make men judge of things