ion, immediately revealed to the mind,
falls into easy harmony with the rest of the system. As
the mind is not a faculty, but an act or acts,--not a
power of perception, but the perception itself,--in its
high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical
language which Coleridge has made popular and
perhaps partially intelligible), the object and the subject
become one; a difficult expression, but the meaning of
which (as it bears on our present subject) may be
something of this kind:--If knowledge be followed as it ought
to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded
in their relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge
of particular outward things, of nature, or life, or
history, becomes in fact, knowledge of God; and the
more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more
the mind is raised above what is perishable in the
phenomena to the idea or law which lies beyond them.
It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal, not upon
the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting
laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect
union with them, it contracts in itself the character of
the objects which possess it. Thus we are emancipated
from the conditions of duration; we are liable even to
death only quatenus patimur, as we are passive things
and not active intelligences; and the more we possess
such knowledge and are possessed by it, the more
entirely the passive is superseded by the active--so that
at last the human soul may "become of such a nature
that the portion of it which will perish with the body in
in comparison with that of it which shall endure, shall
be insignificant and nullius momenti." (Eth v. 38.)

Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the
influence of which upon Europe, direct and indirect, it
is not easy to over-estimate. The account of it is far
from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's labours;
his "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" was the forerunner
of German historical criticism; the whole of which has
been but the application of principles laid down in that
remarkable work. But this was not a subject on which,
upon the present occasion, it was desirable to enter, and
we have designedly confined ourselves to the system
which is most associated with the name of its author.
It is this which has been really powerful, which has
stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine
themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the
absol