sition
something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise
of reason better than mere ferocity. Moral evil need
not disturb us, if--if we can be nothing but what we are,
if we are but as clay.

The moral aspect of the matter will be more clear
as we proceed. We pause, however, to notice one
difficulty of a metaphysical kind, which is best disposed
of in passing. Whatever obscurity may lie about the
thing which we call Time (philosophers not being able
to agree what it is, or whether properly it is anything),
the words past, present, future do undoubtedly convey
some definite idea with them: things will be which
are not yet, and have been which are no longer. Now
if everything which exists be a necessary mathematical
consequence from the nature or definition of the One
Being, we cannot see how there can be any time but
the present, or how past and future have room for a
meaning. God is, and therefore all properties of him
are, just as every property of a circle exists in it as
soon as the circle exists. We may if we like, for
convenience, throw our theorems into the future, and say,
e.g. that if two lines in a circle cut each other, the
rectangle under the parts of the one will equal that
under the parts of the other. But we only mean in
reality that these rectangles are equal; and the future
relates only to our knowledge of the fact. Allowing,
however, as much as we please, that the condition of
England a hundred years hence lies already in embryo
in existing causes, it is a paradox to say that such
condition exists already in the sense in which the properties
of the circle exist; and yet Spinoza insists on
the illustration.

It is singular that he should not have noticed the
difficulty; not that either it or the answer to it (which
no doubt would have been ready enough) are likely to
interest any person except metaphysicians, a class of
thinkers, happily, which is rapidly diminishing.

We proceed to more important matters--to Spinoza's
detailed theory of Nature chiefly as exhibited in man
and in man's mind, a theory which for its bold ingenuity
is the most remarkable which on this dark subject has
ever been proposed. Whether we can believe it or
not, is another question; yet undoubtedly it provides
an answer for every difficulty; it accepts with equal
welcome the extremes of materialism and of spiritualism:
and if it be the test of the soundness of a philosophy
that it will explain phenomena and recon