_ex analogia hominis_ and not _ex analogia universi_, which raises the
individual life, and even the present moment of the individual life,
with its passing feelings, into the standard for measuring the
universe--this, in the eyes of Spinoza, is the source of all error and
evil to man. On the other hand, his highest good is to live the
universal life of reason, or what is the same thing, to view all
things from their centre in God, and to be moved only by the passion
for good in general, "the intellectual love of God." In the treatise
_De Emendatione Intellectus_, Spinoza takes up this contrast in the
first instance from its moral side. "All our felicity or infelicity is
founded on the nature of the object to which we are joined by love."
To love the things that perish is to be in continual trouble and
disturbance of passion; it is to be full of envy and hatred towards
others who possess them; it is to be ever striving after that which,
when we attain it, does not satisfy us; or lamenting over the loss of
that which inevitably passes away from us; only "love to an object
that is infinite and eternal feeds the soul with a changeless and
unmingled joy." But again our love rests upon our knowledge; if we saw
things as they really are we should love only the highest object. It
is because sense and imagination give to the finite an independence
and substantiality that do not belong to it, that we waste our love
upon it as if it were infinite. And as the first step towards truth is
to understand our error, so Spinoza proceeds to explain the defects of
common sense, or in other words, of that first and unreflected view of
the world which he, like Plato, calls opinion. Opinion is a kind of
knowledge derived partly from hearsay, and partly from _experientia
vaga_. It consists of vague and general conceptions of things, got
either from the report of others or from an experience which has not
received any special direction from intelligence. The mind that has
not got beyond the stage of opinion takes things as they present
themselves in its individual experience; and its beliefs grow up by
association of whatever happens to have been found together in that
experience. And as the combining principle of the elements of opinion
is individual and not universal, so its conception of the world is at
once fragmentary and accidental. It does not see things in their
co