ved hearts to love and desire it."
And once more:--"He who loves God will not desire
that God should love him in return with any partial or
particular affection, for that is to desire that God for his
sake should change his everlasting nature and become
lower than himself."

One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would
seem in such a system to be necessarily wanting. Where
individual action is resolved into the modified activity
of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all evolving,
the individuality of the personal man would at best
appear but an evanescent and unreal shadow. Such
individuality, however, as we now possess, whatever it
be, might continue to exist in a future state as really as
it exists in the present, and those to whom it belongs
might be anxious naturally for its persistence. And yet
it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the idea
of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed
into its elements, the soul corresponding to it must
accompany it into an answering dissolution. And this,
indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually affirms, when he
denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness
of what has befallen it in life, "nisi durante corpore."
But Spinozism is a philosophy full of surprises; and our
calculations of what must belong to it are perpetually
baffled. The imagination, the memory, the senses,
whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish
necessarily and eternally; and the man who has been
the slave of his inclinations, who has no knowledge of
God, and no active possession of himself, having in life
possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance
of it with the dissolution of the body.

Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the
essence of the mind, united to the mind as the mind is
united to the body, and thus there is in the soul
something of an everlasting nature which cannot utterly
perish. And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of
his most solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the
thread of his demonstrations, and appeals to the
consciousness. In spite of our non-recollection of what
passed before our birth, in spite of all difficulties from
the dissolution of the body, "Nihilo minus," he says,
"sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse. Nam mens
non minus res illas sentit quas intelligendo concipit,
quam quas in memoria habet. Mentis enim oculi quibus
res videt observatque sunt ipsae demonstrationes."

This percept