Spinoza had to account for all these by means of his analysis of human
nature since he would not grant the existence of supernatural beings and
powers. Spinoza's psychology adequately performs the task. His
psychology demonstrates with unsurpassed thoroughness and clarity how
human emotions, when uncontrolled in any way by intelligence, naturally
attach themselves to all sorts of bizarrely irrelevant and absurd
things, and stimulate the imagination to endow these things with all the
qualities and powers the disturbed hearts of ignorant men desire.
Ignorant and frustrated man, Spinoza showed, frantically dreams with his
eyes open.

VI

Spinoza's method in psychology is dialectical, but his interest is
practical. His psychology one might almost say is a moral psychology.
Spinoza wants to explain mental phenomena through their primary causes
because a knowledge of man's nature is the radical cure for his ills.
The greatest obstacle man has to contend against is his emotional
nature. Not that it is inherently degraded or sinful--the grotesque
superstition some religious moralists have maintained; but man's
emotional nature masters, more often than not, man's rational nature,
and leads man astray. When the emotions are unrestrained and undirected
by knowledge and intelligence, they violently attach themselves to
anything that chances to excite them. Their stark immediacy vitiates
man's judgment. He is unable, while under their sway, to select and
follow the course that is best, because his mind is engulfed in the
evanescent present. In his hectic desire to gain the passing pleasure,
man loses his ultimate good.

But man's salvation, just as much as his damnation, is within his own
control. Salvation or blessedness is something man can achieve by his
own efforts; it is not something he can achieve only by Divine Grace.
For it is no innate perversion of soul, no inherent wickedness of man,
no malicious "free-will" that causes him to follow the lure of the Devil
rather than the light of God. The very elements in man's nature which
cause him to fall are the means by which he can make himself rise. He
can pit one emotion against another and the stronger will not merely
win, but will win over, the weaker. And it is in the nature of the
emotions not to have only one satisfying object, but to be able to
derive satisfaction from almost any object whatsoever. The most
spiritual forms of human love have the same emotional foundat