range a country, and we now
expect his conclusions. To discover the true good
of man, to direct his actions to such ends as will secure
to him real and lasting felicity, and by a comparison of
his powers with the objects offered to them, to ascertain
how far they are capable of arriving at these objects,
and by what means they can best be trained towards
them--is the aim which Spinoza assigns to philosophy.
"Most people," he adds, "deride or vilify their nature;
it is a better thing to endeavour to understand it; and
however extravagant it may be thought in me to do so, I
propose to analyse the properties of that nature as if it
were a mathematical figure." Mind, being, as we have
seen, nothing else than the idea corresponding to this
or that affection of body; we are not, therefore, to
think of it as a faculty, but simply and merely as an act.
There is no general power called intellect, any more
than there is any general abstract volition, but only hic
et ille intellectus et haec et illa volitio, and again, by
the word Mind, is understood not merely acts of will
or intellect, but all forms also of consciousness of
sensation or emotion. The human body being composed
of many small bodies, the mind is similarly composed
of many minds, and the unity of body and of mind
depends on the relation which the component portions
maintain towards each other. This is obviously the
case with body, and if we can translate metaphysics into
common experience, it is equally the case with mind.
There are pleasures of sense and pleasures of intellect;
a thousand tastes, tendencies, and inclinations form our
mental composition; and evidently since one contradicts
another, and each has a tendency to become dominant,
it is only in the harmonious equipoise of their several
activities, in their due and just subordination, that any
unity of action or consistency of feeling is possible. After
a masterly analysis of all these tendencies (the most
complete by far which has ever been made by any moral
philosopher), Spinoza arrives at the principles under
which such unity and consistency can be obtained as the
condition upon which a being so composed can look for
any sort of happiness. And these principles, arrived at
as they are by a route so different, are the same, and are
proposed by Spinoza as being the same, as those of the
Christian Religion.

It might seem impossible in a system which binds
together in so inexorable a sequence the re