blessedness can be secured by
the divine law of Nature alone. Here Spinoza and Rousseau are at one.
It was relevant to Spinoza's purpose to treat only of religious
ceremonial law; but his conclusions apply with equal force and relevancy
to social and political ceremonial law as well. Spinoza's distinction
between ceremonial and divine law is peculiarly significant and
illuminating when applied to marriage. For to-day in marriage, if
anywhere, is it glaringly evident that the legal or religious or social
ceremonial law can at best secure man or woman wealth and social
position. Happiness or blessedness lie altogether beyond its powerful
reach. Marriage is sanctified and made blessed not by the ceremonial law
of priest or city clerk but by the divine law of love. Natural love, or
love free from all ceremonial coercions, is not merely not a
questionable source of marital happiness: it is the only source. The
ceremonial law, the legal or religious marriage custom, has nothing
whatsoever to do with human happiness. If by "free" love is meant love
free from all legal, social and religious ceremonial restraints, then
free love is, according to Spinoza, the only basis of rational marriage.

No man ever treasured the joys of the spirit more than did Spinoza; but
he did not because of that nourish a savage antagonism against the body.
The very bases of his philosophy of the mind saved him from any such
disastrous folly. What Havelock Ellis says "We know at last" Spinoza
knew all the time--"that it must be among our chief ethical rules to see
that we build the lofty structure of human society on the sure and
simple foundations of man's organism." It is because Spinoza knew this
so thoroughly and remembered it so well that he devotes so much of his
attention to the nature of the human mind and the human emotions in a
treatise on ethics.

Mind and body are not intrinsically alien or inimical to one another.
They are cooeperative expressions of the one reality. The mind is the
idea of the body and "in proportion as one body is better adapted than
another to do or suffer many things, in the same proportion will the
mind, at the same time, be better adapted to perceive many things."
Purely psychologically, all that we can ever discover about the
regulating influence glands have upon personality can only go to
corroborate, not to improve this general position. And morally, the
implications are equally far-reaching and profound.

The