when on rare occasions he did refer to him.
Spinoza's days were ending fast. Dr. Schuller, writing to Leibniz on the 6th February, 1677, expresses his fear that Spinoza would not remain much longer among them, as his consumption was growing worse from day to day. He was only forty-four years of age, but his constitution was enfeebled through hereditary consumption, aggravated by the glass-dust from the lenses, and the sedentary habits of the student. And he had lived strenuous days. To the very last he was up and doing. On Saturday afternoon the 2oth February 1677, he was still downstairs chatting with the Van der Spycks, But he had already sent for Dr. Schuller, and retired early to bed. On the Sunday morning Dr.
xcvi INTRODUCTION Schuller arrived. Spinoza was up; and at midday had some chicken-broth which the doctor had ordered for him. There seemed to be no immediate danger, and the Van der Spycks went to church in the afternoon. On their way home they were informed that Spinoza was no more. He had passed away at three o'clock, in the presence of Dr. Schuller.
Four days later Spinoza was buried in the New Church on the Spuy, which is quite near to the Paviljoensgragt. Six coaches followed the cortege, and many prominent people followed him to his last resting-place, which was close to that of Jan de Witt. Of wordly possessions he left very little behind him, and that chiefly in the way of books. Dr. Schuller took possession of some of the most valuable of these, and even then there still remained about 160 works (some of them quite costly), the list of which has fortunately been preserved; and copies of nearly all of them are now in the Spinoza Museum at Rijnsburg. The pro ceeds of these, and of some lenses which he also left behind, were just enough to defray all his debts and the cost of burial — though his grave was but a hired grave, and was used again some years after his death.
In accordance with Spinoza's instructions, his desk, con taining the manuscripts of his unpublished works, was entrusted to the care of Jan Rieuwertsz, the Amsterdam book seller. Immediate publication seemed to be dangerous for publisher and editors; and when they had the courage they had not the money to proceed with the printing. For a time they thought of selling the manuscript of the Ethica to Leibniz, intending no doubt to apply the proceeds towards the cost of printing it from one of their own copies of that work. Schuller had already communicated with Leibniz about it, but at the last moment some one at the Hague came to the rescue, and as early as November 1677 Spinoza's Opera Posthuma appeared in print. It consisted of one quarto volume, and contained the Ethics, the Political Treatise, the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding, the Letters, STATUE OF SPINOZA AT THE HAGUE THE LIFE OF SPINOZA xcvii and the Hebrew Grammar. All names and other means ©f identification had been carefully removed from the corre spondence; the editors' names, as also the name of the pub lisher and the place of publication were not given; and only the initials of Spinoza (B. D. S.) appeared on the title- page. The editors were Jelles (who appears to have written the Preface), Meyer, and Schuller; and the editorial work seems to have been carried on secretly in one of the rooms of the Orphan Asylum, which had just been established in Amsterdam by some of Spinoza's Collegiant friends. It was at this Orphan Asylum (which is still in existence) that some of the originals of Spinoza's letters were subsequently dis covered, with editorial pencil-notes on them.
Two hundred years later a remarkable contrast to this secrecy was witnessed, when the whole learned world joined in celebrating the memory of Spinoza. In 1880 his statue was erected in the Hague, within view of both houses where he had lived his last years. And a new, complete edition of his works was published in 1882, containing a portrait espe cially engraved from the painting in the library at Wolfen- biittel, where Lessing, poet, philosopher, and champion of the ill-used, had, nearly a century before that, taken the first steps towards the due recognition of Spinoza. The tribute paid to his memory was world-wide; and it was well deserved. For there is considerable truth in Heine's witty saying that " all our modern philosophers, though often perhaps unconsciously, see through the glasses which Baruch Spinoza ground."
§9. THE CHARACTER OF SPINOZA In attempting to form an estimate of the character of Spinoza, one should be guided by what is actually known about him from the direct evidence of those who knew him personally. There is a natural temptation to judge his xcviii INTRODUCTION personality by deductions from his views as seen through one's own spectacles. But it is not too much to say that, of the two alternative courses, it is far more safe to interpret the philosophy of Spinoza in the light of what is independently known about his life and character than to estimate his character in the light of certain deductions from an inde pendent interpretation of his views. During his lifetime Spinoza was often condemned and vilified on the score of his opinions, and on account of defects which, it was tacitly assumed, these revealed in his character. There is reason to believe that, but for his death, Spinoza's fate might have been very much like that of Koerbagh. After his death, it was considered a crime to say anything good about Spi noza, and for more than a century afterwards his name was anathema maranatha. Even people who were not too sensi tive to his criticism of the Bible felt that a man who main tained the relativity of good and evil, and believed in universal necessity, had no incentive to be good, and, there fore, was very likely bad. Such an interpretation and deduc tion were, to say the least, very one-sided, and, towards the end of the eighteenth century, its absurdity was exposed by the no less one-sided view which, by laying exclusive stress on " the intellectual love of God " and kindred doctrines of Spinoza, transformed him into a " God-intoxicated" saint.
If we turn to the main facts of Spinoza's life, and to the recorded judgments of the people who knew him personally, there can be no doubt that Spinoza, though not a saint in the accepted sense of the expression, was certainly one of the finest characters of which the history of philosophy can boast. The dominant feature in his character was his devo tion to the pursuit of truth. For it he was ever ready to make all sacrifices. Neither bribes nor threats could in any way seduce him from that pursuit. And he readily sacri ficed his personal comfort in order that he might have money for books, and time for study. To him the pursuit THE LIFE OF SPINOZA xcix of truth was no mere pastime or trade — it was the true life of man. One might almost say that it constituted the religion of Spinoza. Yet he was no mere intellectualist. If his devotion to knowledge reminds one of the striking utterances of his great medieval kinsman, Maimonides (whose Guide of the Perplexed Spinoza read and possessed), his moral earnestness re-echoes something of the voice of the Prophets. Nothing offended him more than the sug gestion that his views tended to discourage the practice of virtue; nothing outraged him more than the reading of Homo Politicus, a book in which, from apparently Spinozistic principles, maxims were deduced for the most selfish and immoral conduct. Again and again he insisted on absolute purity of motive even in the communication of views which he regarded as absolutely true. When sending his Short Treatise to his Amsterdam friends he begs of them to be sure that nothing but the good of their neighbours will ever induce them to communicate its doctrines to others. And it was out of considerateness for his fellow-men that he tried, as far as possible, not to unsettle their religious beliefs. He assured the Van der Spycks that their religion was quite good, and that they need have no misgivings whatever so long as their conduct was good and upright. Good conduct and pure motives, these were the most essential things, and, devoted as he was to truth, he maintained that Turks and heathens who did their duty and loved their fellow-men were filled with the spirit of Christ, whom Spinoza regarded as the highest type of manhood. Even in the professed polemic of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he passes by without criticism the less harmful of orthodox doctrines, although he disagreed with them. But there was no dupli city about him; when men of education invited his views on some of these very doctrines (such as the divinity of Christ) he did not mince matters, but expressed his views without any equivocation. His means for active benevoc INTRODUCTION lence were not great. Still what little he possessed was at the service of his friends. When informed that a con siderable sum of money, which he had lent in this way, was lost, he merely remarked quietly, and with a smile, that he would have to draw in his expenses for the future. Wealth and position had no undue attraction for him. He would not for their sake bind or blind his judgment by accepting the Heidelberg professorship, or even appear to do so by paying a formal compliment to a monarch whose aims and methods he condemned. In this respect he stood head and shoulders above some of his most eminent contemporaries in the world of science. But though of an independent spirit he was neither proud nor cold and reserved. He met half-way, and more, all people who offered him their friendship. He showed wonderful patience with the most mediocre people who turned to him with their difficulties; and he was kindly to the humblest. Amid all the accusa tions brought against Spinoza, no specific charge was ever made against his moral character. It was always his here tical views, and his character as deduced a priori from these views by the ingenuity of " learned parsons," that were flung at his head. This is remarkable in itself, and is amply con firmed by Colerus, the Lutheran pastor, who, though he considered Spinoza's heresies to be abominable and most outrageous, has nevertheless made it perfectly clear that Spinoza's morals were unassailable. The peasants at Rijns- burg and Voorburg, we are expressly told, agreed that he was " a man whom it was good to know, kind, upright, obliging, and of good morals." People of culture felt a peculiar charm in his presence, and men of his own age, and even older men, looked upon him with the respect of disciples. We have seen already what impression he made on Oldenburg and the Seigneur de St. Evremont when they came into per sonal touch with him. The account which we have from Dr. Lucas, who knew Spinoza intimately in the Hague, breathes THE LIFE OF SPINOZA ci a spirit of the utmost veneration. And many who have only read his writings have felt themselves in the presence of an uncommon moral atmosphere of utter unselfishness and disinterestedness, and a boundless faith in human goodness. Spinoza was not a saint. He did not believe in turning the cheek to the smiter. Nor was he so other-worldly as to despise the world and the flesh. He could say hard things against insolent ignoramuses and heretic-hunters; he never quite forgot the wrong done to him by his kinsmen and his tribe; and, in the heat of conflict, he even forgot to pause for a moment in order to acknowledge some of the merits of the Law and the Prophets. He was human, and was influenced by emotions to a far greater extent than is supposed by those who exaggerate his intellectualism, be cause they deduce his character from certain aspects of his philosophy. He could be angry with immorality and in tolerance, and he felt injured by unmerited suspicion. He laughed to see divines excel the devil by their wiles; and he wept over the tragic fate of the de Witts. He was not even an ascetic. Though extraordinarily abstemious in his mode of life — living on a few pence a day and with a pipe for his only luxury — this was mainly due to his circum stances. His desire for independence and his devotion to books made it impossible for him to earn sufficient to in dulge in the ordinary comforts of life, and so abstemious ness gradually became a habit with him. But he had no contempt for the reasonable pleasures or joys of life. " I enjoy life [he wrote] and try to live it, not in sorrow and sighing, but in peace, joy, and cheerfulness." And those who knew him have confirmed the truth of this. He could not understand how any one could find, or imagine that God would find, any virtue in sighs and tears, and the like. " Nothing [he insists] but a gloomy and sad superstition for bids enjoyment." Indeed, what he had, in the first instance, sought in philosophy was guidance in the attainment of cii INTRODUCTION happiness. It was not, as in the case of Descartes, discontent with the then state of knowledge that drove him to philosophy, but discontent with the ordinary pursuits and pleasures of life, because they failed to bring abiding happiness. This is evident from the opening passage of his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding, already quoted above. He had turned to philosophy for guidance in the pursuit of happiness, and found his happiness in the pursuit of philosophy.
On the other hand, there was certainly something of the higher mysticism about Spinoza. It would be a mistake to empty his religious terminology of all its religious meaning. We are trenching here on a difficult question of interpreta tion, and we do not wish to dogmatise. Still it should not be forgotten that, though convinced of the truth of his philosophy, Spinoza was far from supposing that it was the whole truth. There were but few things, even in the world of extension and thought, of which he professed to have the highest kind of knowledge; while, besides extension and thought, there were infinite aspects of the universe (or attributes of substance) of which he avowedly had no know ledge whatever. He felt more than he saw. And though he loved to live in the clear, common light of day, and hated the bigotry and superstition that lurk in the shadows of the twilight, yet he felt the glow of the presence that dwells in the setting sun, even if he was not absorbed in visions of a light that never shone on land or sea. It was some thing of this mystic feeling that prompted his religious language, and gave to his personality that charm which won all who came near him. It also won for him the sym pathy of poets like Goethe and Lessing, Coleridge and Wordsworth, just as his calm scientific outlook has made him a favourite with men of science. His moral ardour seems almost aglow with this mystic fire, and, if we may not call him a priest of the most high God, yet he was certainly a prophet of the power which makes for righteousness.
HISTORY OF THE SHORT TREATISE §i. THE DISCOVERY OF THE MANUSCRIPTS THE Short Treatise was not published in the lifetime of Spinoza, nor was it included in the Opera Posthuma pub lished in November 1677, shortly after the death of Spinoza. The writer of the Preface to the Opera Posthuma does not even refer to it specifically. He alludes to the essay On the Rainbow, of which he appears to have been unable to obtain a copy, and which he believed to have been burned by Spinoza. But, for the rest, he simply remarks in a general sort of way that " although it is credible that some work of our philosopher [Spinoza] may still be in the possession of somebody or other without his knowledge, it may never theless be assumed that nothing will be found therein which is not already given repeatedly in these writings," that is, in the Ethics, the Political Treatise, the Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding, the Correspondence, and the Hebrew Grammar, which between them constituted the Opera Posthuma. Thus no reference is made to the Short Treatise even as a possibly lost work of Spinoza. On the other hand, it should be remembered that to the editors of the Opera Posthuma, as indeed to Spinoza himself, the Short Treatise appeared to have been superseded by the Ethics. Hence the silence about the Short Treatise may not be so strange after all, and one should not attach too much importance to it. A report dating from 1703, the truth of which there is no reason to doubt, tends to show that J. Rieuwertsz (junior), the publisher of the Opera Posthuma, ciii civ INTRODUCTION actually possessed a manuscript copy of what is now called the Short Treatise, but which was then not unnaturally regarded simply as an early draft of the Ethics.
In 1703, Gottlieb Stolle (1673-1744) — a Silesian who was appointed Professor of Political Science at Jena in 1717 — and a Dr. Hallmann travelled through Holland, where they interviewed various people who had known Spinoza. Among others they saw Rieuwertsz at Amsterdam. Rieuwertsz gave them some personal reminiscences of Spinoza, for whom (so they relate) he showed uncommon affection, and, with tears in his eyes, wished that Spinoza were still alive. Rieuwertsz also showed them several manuscripts of Spinoza's works, and among them was one apparently written in Spinoza's own handwriting. This (according to Hallmann) was no other than Spinoza's first, Dutch version of the Ethica; it was quite different from the published Ethica — not worked out in the geometric method, but in the ordinary way, and divided into chapters, like the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus; Rieuwertsz assured them that the printed Ethica was very much better than this manuscript version, though the latter contained some things which were omitted from the former, notably the chapter on the Devil. Several friends of Spinoza, said Rieuwertsz, had copies of that manuscript, which had never been printed because the Latin version, which had been published, was altogether superior and had been well edited. The story is not altogether free from difficulties. But it undoubtedly gives us an explicit reference to the so-called Short Treatise. Stolle and Hall- mann's account of their travels, written in 1704, was not published till 1847,* but Stolle repeated his information about the Short Treatise in his Brief Introduction to the History of Learning, which was published in 1718. The story about the Dutch Ethics and the chapter on the Devil was repeated by * Extracts from Stolle-Hallmann's Reisebeschreibung are given in Freu- denthal's Die Lebensgeschichte Spinozas, pp. 221 #.
HISTORY OF THE SHORT TREATISE cv ]. F. Reimmann (1668-1743) in his Catalogue of Theological Books, which was published in 1731, also by ]. C. Mylius in his Library of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Authors, which was published in 1740. These notices, however, do not seem to have attracted any attention. Spinoza had such an evil reputation among respectable scholars (including Stolle and Reimmann) that there was no anxiety to discover or recover any of his unpublished works, the published ones being considered more than enough. In the latter half of the eighteenth century we observe, indeed, some signs of an active interest in Spinoza remains. C. T. de Murr, of Nurnberg, visited Holland in search of Spinoza relics. He brought back with him a Latin manuscript copy of Spinoza's notes to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and a report that Spinoza's Ethica was originally written in Dutch and contained a chapter on the Devil, that he then trans lated it into Latin, throwing it at the same time into geometric form, owing to which and other alterations it was retranslated from the Latin into Dutch by Jarig Jelles. For about a century the matter rested there.
In 1851 Edward Boehmer, Professor of Philosophy at Halle, went to Holland, also in search of Spinoza rarities. At Amsterdam he bought from F. Miiller, a well-known bookseller there, a copy of the Life of Spinoza by Colerus. Section 12 of Colerus' Life of Spinoza treats very briefly of the philosopher's unpublished writings, and Boehmer's copy had a manuscript note (in Dutch) to this section, saying that among certain votaries of philosophy there was still extant, in manuscript, a treatise of Spinoza, which treats of the same subjects as the printed Ethica, though not in the geometric method, and that its style and general drift show it to be one of the earliest of Spinoza's writings, in fact the first draft of the Ethica, and for some people less obscure than this, just because it is not cast in the geometric form, except to a very small extent in the h cvi INTRODUCTION Appendix to the treatise. And at the end of the same copy of Colerus' Life of Spinoza there actually followed a fairly complete analysis of the Short Treatise, chapter by chapter, and written in the same hand as the note to section 12. Boehmer published his Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate Lineamenta in 1852, and a new impetus was given to the search for the Short Treatise. Not long afterwards a manuscript copy of the Short Treatise itself came to light. F. Miiller, the same bookseller from whom Boehmer had got his copy of the Colerus, bought this manuscript of the Short Treatise at an auction. And while Dr. J. van Vloten was preparing to publish it together with some Spinoza letters, which had been dis covered at the Collegiant Orphan Asylum in Amsterdam, a second (and older) manuscript of the Short Treatise was discovered. The poet, Adrian Bogaers, of Rotterdam, found it among his books. This (the older) manuscript is generally referred to as codex A, the other as codex B. The first edition of the Short Treatise was published, in 1862, by Dr. ]. van Vloten in his Ad Benedicti de Spinoza Opera qucz Supersunt Omnia Supplementum. It was based on both the manuscripts, and was accompanied by a Latin translation. A more careful edition of codex A was published in 1869 by Professor C. Schaarschmidt, of Bonn, and also by Van Vloten and Land in their editions of the complete works of Spinoza (1882, 1895.) Both manuscripts are now in the Royal Library at the Hague.