d to the cautious, methodical Spinoza, who
carried his thoughts about with him for twenty years,
deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last
to the world in a form more severe than with such
subjects had ever been so much as attempted? With
him, as with all great men, there was no effort after
sublime emotions. A plain, practical person, his object
in philosophy was only to find a rule on which he
could depend to govern his own actions and his
own judgment: and his treatises contain no more
than the conclusions at which he arrived in this purely
personal search, and the grounds on which he rested
them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of
himself as he has given it in the opening of his
unfinished Tract, "De Emendatione Intellectas." His
language is very beautiful, but elaborate and full; and,
as we have a long journey before us, we must be
content to epitomize it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and
asking himself what was his place and business in it,
he turned for examples to his fellow-men, and found
little that he could venture to imitate. Whatever they
professed, they all really guided themselves by their
different notions of what they thought desirable; and
these notions themselves resting on no more secure
foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience, the
experience of one not being the experience of another,
men were all, so to say, rather playing experiments with
life than living, and the larger portion of them miserably
failing. Their mistakes arising, as it seemed to Spinoza,
from inadequate knowledge, things which at one time
looked desirable disappointing expectation when obtained,
and the wiser course concealing itself often
under an uninviting exterior, he desired to substitute
certainty for conjecture, and endeavour to find, by
some surer method, where the real good of man lay.
All this may sound very Pagan, and perhaps it is so.
We must remember that he had been brought up a
Jew, and had been driven out of the Jews' communion;
his mind was therefore in contact with the bare facts of
life, with no creed or system lying between them and
himself as the interpreter of it. Some true account of
things, however, he thought it likely that there must
be, and the question was, how to find it. Of all forms
of human thought, but one, he reflected, would admit
of the certainty which he required--the mathematical;
and, therefore, if certain knowledge were attaina