live virtuously only when they are absolutely coerced
so to live by God! Their radical inability to understand or believe the
self-reliant moral person grows from the very heart of their theology.
For "free-will"--the only freedom they know--is the necessary condition,
not of man's morality, but of God's!

There is no fatalism in Spinoza's system. Fatalism is the moral value of
a theory of the universe. That theory is fatalistic, which makes the
activities man cherishes either futile or impossible. Any system that
puts man at the mercy of the flux of events does precisely this. This is
necessarily done by a system according to which the universe does not
faithfully observe an immutable order, does not obey certain fixed and
eternal laws. Nothing is as fatal as an accident; no universe as
fatalistic as an accidental universe.

There is no fatalism in Spinoza's system because there are no accidents
in Spinoza's universe. All things are necessarily determined by
immutable laws, and man, who is an integral part of the universe, is
necessarily without "free-will." In Spinoza's system, ends, being
undetermined (as contrasted with their being determined in the
theological sense explained above) they can exercise no fatalistic
power; and means, although determined (in the strict scientific sense)
are similarly impotent because they are, in the life of man, subordinate
to ends. Consequently, Spinoza was able to write upon Human Freedom with
a truth and clarity and force excelling by far all theological,
teleological, "free-will," idealistic philosophers from Plato to Josiah
Royce. Spinoza was able to write thus because, not in spite of the fact
that he placed at the heart of his philosophy the doctrine of necessity;
because, not in spite of the fact that he developed the only complete
system of philosophy strictly consistent with the principles of natural
science or mathematical physics. Spinoza is, perhaps, the only
thoroughly emancipated, the only thoroughly modern and scientific
philosopher that ever lived. And he is, much more certainly, the only
thoroughly emancipated, the only thoroughly modern and scientific
ethicist that ever lived.

To-day, in view of the extensive dominion and authority of science, the
objections against Spinoza's doctrine of necessity can hardly be as
self-righteous and as loud as they were two centuries ago. The principle
of the uniformity of Nature has become the established foundation of
natural