virtue of the mind is not to despise or reject but to understand and
transform. And it clearly must be more excellent for the mind to know
both itself and the body than it is for the mind to know itself alone.
For natural science is the result when the mind organizes into a system
what are, in their own nature, simply apprehensions of bodily
existences; and art is the result when the mind transfuses with an ideal
quality of its own what are, in their own nature, simply apprehensions
of bodily excellences of form or motion, color or sound. Matter is, in
its nature, no more hostile to spirit than body is alien to mind.
Paradise is not a non-or super-physical realm; it is a physical realm
made harmonious with the ideality of the soul. Spirit is an
appreciation, a transmutation of matter. For the lover, the physical
embrace is a spiritual revelation.

The fundamental metaphysical law from which Spinoza's ethical system
flows is that everything endeavors to persist in its own being. This law
is the metaphysical equivalent of the first law of motion in physics
which is itself the equivalent of the law of identity in logic. By his
law Spinoza does not mean anything which anticipates the
nineteenth-century doctrine of the competitive struggle for existence.
On the contrary, nothing is so clear to Spinoza as the fact that the
most efficient way of preserving one's own being is not by competitive
but by cooeperative activity. Especially is this true of human beings. By
his own efforts a solitary man cannot, even after he has been nursed to
maturity, maintain himself in a decent manner. Certainly he is unable
successfully to resist his foes. But with the aid of his fellows man can
develop a highly complex and tolerably stable civilization, all the
excellences of which he can enjoy at the comparatively small risk of
becoming a victim of its dangers. Social organization is the natural
expression of man's fundamental endeavor to preserve himself. A perfect
social organization naturally expresses the highest form of human
existence--individualism without anarchy and communism without
oppression.

Consistent with his primary law of being, Spinoza defines virtue not in
terms of negations, inhibitions, deficiencies or restraints; virtue he
defines in terms of positive human qualities compendiously called human
power. Virtue is power, however, not in the sense of the Renaissance
ideal of "manliness" as we glimpse it, for instance, in Ben