SPINOZA.

Benedict de Spinoza a Jew by birth, who forsook Judaism, and at last became an Atheist, was a native of Amsterdam. He was a systematical Atheist, and brought his Atheism into a new method, although the ground of his doctrine was the same with that of several ancient and modern philosophers, both in Europe and the east. I think that he is the first who reduced Atheism: into a system, and formed it into a body of doctrine, ordered and connected according to the manner of the geometricians; but otherwise his opinion is not new. It has been believed long ago that the whole universe is but one substance, and that God and the world are but one being. Pietro della Valle mentions certain Mahometans who call themselves “Ehl eltahkik, or, men of truth, men of certainty, who believe that there is nothing existent but the four elements, which are God, man, and every thing else.” He also mentions the Zindikites, another Mahometan sect. “They come nearer the Sadducees, and have their name from them. They do not believe a Providence, nor the resurrection of the dead, as Giggoius shews upon the word Zindik. One of their opinions is, that whatever is seen, whatever is in the world, whatever hath been created, is God.” There have been such Heretics among Christians, for we find in the beginning of the thirteenth century, one David of Dinant, who made no distinction between God and the first matter. It is a mistake to say that he is the first who vented such a foolish doctrine. Albertus Magnus mentions a philosopher who had done the like. “Alexander, the Epicurean, held that God was matter, or was not different from it, and that all things were essentially God, and that forms were imaginary accidents, and had no real entity, and, therefore he said all things were substantially the same, and this God he called sometimes Jupiter, sometimes Apollo, 1

and sometimes Pallas, and that forms were the robe of Pallas, and garment of Jupiter; and he asserted that none of the wise men could fully reveal what was concealed under the robe of Pallas, and the garment of Jupiter.” Some believe that this Alexander lived in Plutarch’s time; others say, in express words, that he lived before David of Dinant, who, perhaps, knew not that there was such a philosopher of the Epicurean sect, but at least it must be granted me that he knew very well be bad not invented that doctrine. Had he not learned it of his master? Was he not the disciple of that Almalricus whose dead body was dug up and burnt in the year 1208, and who taught that all things were God, and but one being? “All things are God, God is all things. Creator and creature the same. Ideas create and are created. God is therefore said to be the end of all things, because they all return into him that they may rest unchangeably in God, and continue one individual and unalterable. And as Abraham is not of one nature, Isaac of another, but of one and the same, so he asserted that all things were one, and all things were God. For he affirmed God to be the essence of all creatures.” See Prateolus, in Elencho Hæresum, Voce Almaricus, page m. 23. ¹¹²

I dare not affirm that Strato, a peripatetic philosopher, was of the same opinion, for I do not know whether he taught that the universe or nature was a simple and only substance; I only know that he believed it to be inanimate, and that he acknowledged no other God than nature. As he laughed at Epicurus’s atoms and vacuum, one might think that he made no distinction between the several parts of the world; but this is no necessary consequence. All that can be concluded is, that his opinion comes a great deal nearer Spinozism than the system of atoms. There is even ground to believe that he did not teach, as the

atomists did, that the world was a new work, and produced by chance; but that he taught, as the Spinozists do, that nature has produced it necessarily, and from all eternity. I think the following words of Plutarch, if rightly understood, signify, that nature made all things of itself, and without knowledge, and not that its works began by chance. “Finally, Strabo denies that the world itself is an animal, and will have it, that nature obeys the casual impulses of fortune, for a certain spontaneous power of nature gives to things a beginning, and in like manner afterwards, an end is put by the same nature to physical motions.” Plutarchus adversus Colotem, p. 1115, b. ¹¹³ Seneca also represents Plato’s doctrine, and that of Strato, as two opposite extremes; one of them deprived God of a body, and the other deprived him of a soul. I think I have read in father Salier’s book upon the species of the Eucharist, that several ancient philosophers or heretics taught the unity of all things; but because I have not that book now, I only mention this by the by.

The doctrine of the world, which was so

common among the ancients, and made the principal part of the system of the stoics , is, at the bottom, the same with that of Spinoza, which would more clearly appear, if it had been explained by authors versed in geometry; but because the books wherein it is mentioned are written rather in a rhetorical than a dogmatical method, whereas Spinoza is a precise writer, and avoids the figurative style, which often hinders us from having a just notion of a body of doctrine; hence it is that we find several material differences between his system, and that of the soul of the world. If any one should maintain that Spinozism is more coherent, he should also maintain that it is not so orthodox; for the stoics did not deprive God of his Providence; they' re-united in him the knowledge of

all things, whereas Spinoza ascribes to him only sepa rated and very limited knowledge. Head these words of Seneca: “Eundem quem hos Jovem intelligunt, custodem rectoremque universi, animum ac spiritum mundani hujus operis dominum et artificem, cui nomen omne convenit. Vis illum fatum vocare? non errabis. Hic est, ex quo suspensa sunt omnia, causa caussarum. Vis illum providentiam dicere? recte dices. Est enim, cujus consilio huic mundo providetur, ut inconcussus eat, et actus suos explicet. Vis illum naturam vocare? non peccabis. Est enim, ex quo nata sunt omnia, cujus spiritu vivimus. Vis illum vocare mundum? non falleris. Ipse enim est, totum quod vides, totus suis partibus inditus, et se sustinens vi sua. Seneca, Quæst. Natur. lib. ii. cap. xiv. ¹¹⁴ Quid est autem, bur non existimes in eo divini aliquid existere, qui Dei pars est? Totum hoc quo continemur, et unum est, et Deus, et socii ejus sumus et membra.—They mean the same Jupiter as we, the preserver and governor of the universe, a mind and spirit, the lord and artificer of this mundane fabric, to whom every appellation doth agree. Will you call him fate? You will not be mistaken. It is he upon whom all things depend, the cause of causes. Will you name him Providence? You will be in the right. For it is he by whose care this world is so ordered that it goes on steadily, and exerts its operations. Will you give him the name of Nature? You mistake not. For it is he from whom all things receive their beginning, by whose spirit we live. Will you call him the world? You speak the truth. For he is all what you see, al) diffused through all its parts, and supporting himself by his own power. Why therefore do not you believe that there is something divine in that which is a part of God? All that in which we are contained is both one, and God, and we are his companions and members.” Read also

Cato’s discourse in the ninth book of Lucan’s Phar salia, especially these three verses:

Estne Dei sedes nisi terra, et pontus, et aër,
Et coelum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?
Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris.

Lucan. Pharsal. lib. ix. ver. 578.

Is not the seat of Jove, earth, sea, and air,
And heaven, and virtue! Where would we farther trace
The god? Where’er we move, whate’er we see
Is Jove. ....

I shall observe, by the way, an absurdity of those who maintain the system of the soul of the world. They say that all the souls, both of men and brutes, are particles of the soul of the world, which are reunited to their whole by the death of the body: and to make us understand it, they compare animals to bottles full of water, floating upon the sea. If those bottles were broken, their water would be re-united to its whole; thus it is with particular souls, say they, when death destroys the organs in which they were shut up. Nay, some say that extacies, dreams, and intense meditations, re-unite a man’s soul to the soul of the world, and that this is the reason why people foretel things to come by composing figures of geomancy. Gassendus, in Examine Philosoph. Fluddanæ, num. 29, Operum, tom. iii, pag. 247. ¹¹⁵ It is no difficult thing to perceive the falsity of this parallel. The matter of the bottles floating in the sea is an inclosure, which keeps the sea water from touching the water they are full of; but if there were a soul of the world, it would be dispersed through all the parts of the universe, and therefore nothing could prevent the union of the soul to its whole, and death could not produce that re-union.

From the following passage of Bernier, it will also appear, that Spinozism is only a particular method of explaining a doctrine which very much prevails in the East Indies.

“You are not ignorant of the doctrine of many ancient philosophers concerning the great soul of the world, whereof they say our souls and those of brutes are portions. Should we thoroughly examine Plato’s, and Aristotle’s doctrine, perhaps we should find that it was their opinion. This is in a manner the universal doctrine of the Pundits, pagans in the East Indies; and that very same doctrine constitutes to this day the cabala of the Soufys, and of the greatest part of the men of letters in Persia, and is explained in Persian verses very sublime and emphatical in their Goult-chez-raz, or parterre of mysteries; as it has been the doctrine of Fluyd, which our great Gassendus has so learnedly confuted, and that wherein most of our chemists are bewildered. Now those Cabalists, or Indian Pundits, carry the extravagance farther than all those philosophers, and pretend that God, or that Supreme Being which they call Achar, immutable, immoveable, has not only produced or taken souls out of its own substance, but also whatever is material or corporeal in the universe, and that their production was not made in the way of efficient causes, but as a spider produces a cob-web out of its own bowels, and re-assumes it whenever it pleases. Creation therefore, say these imaginary doctors, is only an extraction or extension which God makes out of his own substance, of those webs, which he draws as it were out of his own bowels, in the same manner as destruction is only his re-assuming that divine substance, those divine webs into himself; so that the last day of the world, which they call Maperlé, or Pralea, in which they believe there will be a general destruction of all things, will be only a general re-assuming of all those webs which God had thus emitted out of himself. ‘And therefore,’ say they, ‘there is nothing real and effective in any thing which we think we see, hear, smell, taste, or touch; this world is nothing but a kind of dream, and a mere illusion,

because that multitude and great variety of things that appear to us, are but one and the same thing, viz. God himself, as all our different numbers, ten, twenty, one hundred, a thousand, and so of others, are but one and the same unity repeated several times.’ But if you ask them the reason of such a fancy, and if you desire them to explain that emanation and return of substance, that extension, that apparent diversity, or how it comes to pass that God, who is not corporeal, but biapek, as they own, and incorruptible, should nevertheless be divided into so many portions of bodies and souls; their answer consists only in comparisons, that God is like an immense ocean, in which many vials full of water should move; that those vials, wherever they should go, would be always in the same ocean, in the same water; and that if they should break, the waters contained in them would then be united to their whole, to that ocean of which they are portions. Or they will tell you that it is with God as it is with light, which is the same all over the world, and yet appears a thousand ways different, according to the variety of the objects on which it falls, or according to the different colours and figures of the glasses through which it is conveyed. They will answer you, I say, only with these comparisons, which have no proportion to God, and are only fit to cast a mist before the eyes of ignorant people; and no solid answer can be expected from them. If they be told that those vials would indeed be in the like water, but not in the same, and that there is indeed a like light all over the world, but not the same; and so with many other strong objections, with which they are perpetually confounded; they repeat still the same comparisons, and the same fine words, or as the Soufys do, the fine poems of their Goult-chez-raz.” Bernier, Suite des Memoires sur l’Empire du Grand Mogul, pag. 202, et seq. Dutch edit. ¹¹⁶

It appears from the following passage, that Peter Abelard is likewise accused of asserting that all things are God, and that God is all things. “Empedocles taught, that the first amicable conjunction of the elements was God and matter, of which the other beings were made. This was the theology of that age, this their opinion of the first cause. But at last it grew obsolete, and was reckoned amongst the dreams and chimeras of the ancients. This, among the ruins and rubbish of the ancients, was revived by Peter Abelard, a man bold and famous; he found it buried in ashes, and as Orpheus did Euridice, brought it back from hell. My authors are Vasquez and Smisingus. He asserted that God was all things, and that all things were God, that God was converted into all things, and all things transformed into God, because prepossessed with the theology of Empedocles, or perhaps of Anaxagoras, be distinguished the species according to appearance only, namely, because some atoms appear in one subject which lie hidden in another.” Caramuel, Philosophiae Realis. lib. iii. sect. iii, pag. 175. ¹¹⁷

To the foregoing, may be added a Chinese sect, called Foe Kiao. It was established by royal authority among the Chinese, in the year of the Christian era. Its first founder was the son of the king In Van Fam, and was at first called Xe, or Xe Kia; and afterwards when he was thirty years of age, Foe, that is, no man. The prolegomena of the Jesuits, prefixed to Confucius’s book, published by them at Paris, treats of that founder at large. It is said there, that “having retired into a desart, as soon as he came to be nineteen years of age, and having put himself under the discipline of four gymnosophists to learn philosophy of them, he remained under their direction till the age of thirty years, when rising in the morning before break of day, and contemplating the planet Venus, that bare sight gave him immediately a perfect knowledge of the first principle; so that being full of

a divine inspiration, or rather of pride and folly, he betook himself to instruct men, gave himself out as a god, and drew after him fourscore thousand disciples. At seventy-nine years of age, being upon the point of death, he declared to his disciples that for the space of forty years that he had preached to the world, be had not told them the truth; that he had concealed it under the veil of metaphors and figures; but that it was time now to declare it to them. ‘ There is nothing,' said he, ‘ to be enquired after, and on which we may place our hopes, but nothingness and a vacuum, which is the first principle of all things.” Here is a man very different from our unbelievers; they do not leave off speaking against religion but towards the latter end of their life; they only renounce their libertinism, when they think the time of departing this life draws near: but it was then that Foe began to declare his atheism. “His disciples divided his doctrine into two parts; one is outward, and is that which is publicly preached and taught; the other is inward, which is carefully concealed from the vulgar, and discovered only to those that are initiated. The outward doctrine which, as the Bonzes express it, ‘ is only like the wooden frame on which an arch is built, and that is afterwards removed when the building is finished, consists in teaching that there is a real difference between good and evil, justice and injustice; that there is another life, wherein men shall be punished or rewarded for what they have done in this world; that happiness may be attained by thirty-two figures and four score qualities; that Foe or Xaca is a deity and the saviour of men; that he was born for their sake out of compassion for the errors he saw them in; that he has expiated their sins; and that by virtue of his expiation they shall obtain salvation after death, and shall have a new and more happy birth in another world.’” They add to this, five moral precepts and six works of mercy, and threaten with damnation those who neglect those duties.

“The inward doctrine which is never imparted to the vulgar, because they ought to be kept to their duty by the fear of hell and such like stories, as those philosophers say, is however, in their opinion the solid and true one. It consists in laying down as the principle and end of all things, a certain vacuum and. real nothingness. They say our first parents issued from that vacuum, and returned into it when they died; and that it is so with all men who are resolved into that principle by death; that men, all the elements, and all creatures, make part of that vacuum, and that therefore there is but one and the same substance, which is different in all particular beings only by figures and qualities, or an internal configuration much like water, which is always essential water whether it have the form of snow, hail, rain, or ice.” If it be a monstrous thing to assert that plants, brutes, and men are really the same thing, and to ground such an opinion upon this that all particular beings are not distinct from their principle, it is still more monstrous to say that this principle has no thought, no power, no virtue; and yet this is the doctrine of those philosophers, they place the supreme perfection of that principle in its inaction, and absolute repose. Spinoza was not so absurd: the only or sole substance he admits, is always acting, always thinking; and his most general abstractions could not enable him to divest it of action and thought: the foundations of his doctrine do not allow it.

Observe by the way, that the followers of Foe teach quietism; for they say that all those who seek true happiness, ought to be so far absorbed by profound meditations, as to make no use of their intellect; and that they ought through a perfect insensibility, to sink into the repose and inaction of the first principle, which is the true way of being perfectly

like it and partaking of happiness. They farther say, that those who have attained to that state of quietude, may follow the usual course of life as to the outside, and teach others the doctrine commonly received. It is only in private and inwardly, that one ought to practise the contemplative institute of the beatifical inaction. Those who were most intent upon this contemplation of the first principle, formed a new sect called Vu guei Kiao, that is, the sect of the idle or slothful, nihil agentium. Thus among monks, those who pretend to the most strict observance, form new communities or a new sect. The greatest lords and the most illustrious persons, were so infatuated with this quietism, that they believed insensibility to be the way to perfection and beatitude; and that the nearer a man came to the nature of a block or a stone, the greater progress he made, the more he was like the first principle into which he was to return. It was not enough that the body should be without motion for several hours, the soul was also to be immovable and destitute of all manner of sense. A follower of Confucius refuted the impertinences of that sect, and fully proved this maxim of Aristotle, that nothing can be made out of nothing; nevertheless they maintained and spread themselves, and there are many people to Ahis day, who apply themselves to those vain contemplations. Did we not know the extravagances of our quietists, we should be apt to think that the writers who mention those speculative Chinese, neither well understood, nor faithfully related what they say of them; but if we consider what passes among Christians, we cannot with reason disbelieve the extravagances ascribed to the sect Foe Kiao, or Vu guei Kiao.

But to return to Spinoza; I have not been able to learn any particulars relating to his family, but there is reason to believe that it was mean and inconsiderable. He learned the Latin tongue of a physician

who taught it at Amsterdam; and applied himself early to the study of divinity, and bestowed many years upon it, and afterwards he wholly devoted himself to the study of philosophy. Having a geometrical genius, and being desirous of having a good reason for every thing, he quickly disliked the doctrine of the rabbins, so that the Jews easily perceived he did not approve several articles of their religion; for he was against any constraint in matters of belief, and a great enemy to dissimulation, and therefore he freely declared his doubts and his opinions. It is said that the Jews offered to tolerate him, provided he would comply outwardly with their ceremonies, and even that they promised him a yearly pension; but he could not resolve upon such a hypocrisy. However, it was only by degrees that he left their synagogue; and perhaps he would not have broken with them so soon, had he not been treacherously attacked coming from a play, by a Jew who gave him a thrust with a knife. The wound was slight, but he believed the assassin designed to kill him, and from that time he left them altogether, which was the reason of his excommunication. I have enquired into the circumstances of it, but have not been able to find them out; but he wrote in the Spanish tongue an apology for his leaving the synagogue, which has not been printed: however it is known that he inserted several things in it that have appeared since in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, printed at Amsterdam in the year 1670; a book which contains all the seeds of the Atheism he so plainly discovered in his Opera Posthuma.

When Spinoza betook himself to the study of philosophy, he quickly grew out of conceit with the common systems, and was wonderfully pleased with that of Descartes. He felt so strong an inclination to inquire after truth, that he renounced the world in a manner, the better to succeed in that inquiry. Not

contented to free himself from all manner of business, he also left Amsterdam, because the visits of his friends too much interrupted his speculations,' and retired into the country, where he meditated without any hinderance, and made microscopes and telescopes. He continued in the same course after he had settled at the Hague, and was so well pleased with meditating and putting his meditations into order, and communicating them to his friends, that he spent very little time in any recreation, and was some· times three whole months without stepping out of doors.

Though Spinoza thus lived a very retired life, his name and his reputation spread every where; and free-thinkers resorted to him from all parts. I omit the rest, and I shall only say that the prince of Condé, whose learning was almost as great as his courage, and who loved the conversation of free-thinkers, desired to see Spinoza, and procured him a pass to come to Utrecht while he commanded there the troops of France. The palatine court desired to have him, and offered him a professorship of philosophy at Heidelburg; but he refused it as being an employment little consistent with his great desire of inquiring into truth without any interruption. He fell sick of a lingering disease, of which he died at the Hague, the twenty-first of February, 1674, being somewhat above forty-four years of age.

Those who have been acquainted with Spinoza, and the peasants of the villages where he lived a retired life for some time, all say that he was a sociable, affable, honest, friendly, and a good moral man. This is strange, but after all it is not a more surprising thing than to see men live an ill life, though they be fully persuaded of the truth of the gospel. Some will have it that he followed the maxim “nemo repente turpissimus,” and that he became an Atheist only by degrees; and that he was very far from being so in the year 1663, when he published

the geometrical demonstration of Descartes’s principles. He appears as orthodox in that book upon the nature of God, as Descartes himself; but we must know that he did not then speak according to his subsequent persuasion: there is ground to believe that the ill use he made of some maxims of that philosopher, occasioned his Atheism. Some say that the pseudonymous piece De Jure Ecclesiasticorum, printed in 1665, was the forerunner of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.

All those who have confuted the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, have discovered in it the seeds of Atheism, but none have done it so clearly as Mr John Bredenburg. He was a citizen of Rotterdam, who published there a book in 1675, entitled Joannis Bre denburgii Enervatio Tractatus Thelogico-Politici, una cum Demonstratione, geometrico ordine disposita, Naturam non esse Deum, cujus effati contrario prædictus Tractatus unice innititur. He set in a full light what Spinoza had endeavoured to wrap up and disguise, and made a solid confutation of it. The readers were surprised that a man who was no professed scholar, and who had very little learning, should have been able to dive into all the principles of Spinoza, and to confute them so successfully, after he had represented them in their full strength by a fair analysis. I have heard of a remarkable thing, viz. that this author having many times considered his answer and the principle of his adversary, found at last that his principle might be brought to a demonstration; whereupon he undertook to prove that there is no other cause of all things but a Being which necessarily exists, and acts by an immutable, unavoidable, and unalterable necessity. He followed the method of the geometricians, and after he had drawn up his demonstration, he examined it all manner of ways; he endeavoured to find out the weak side of it, and could never think of any way to

confute it, nor even to weaken it, which made him very uneasy; he groaned and sighed, he was angry with reason, and desired the most learned friends to help him to find out the fault of his demonstration. Nevertheless, he suffered no one to take a copy of it; Francis Cuper translated it by stealth, though he had promised not to do it. That man, perhaps, moved by the mutual jealousy of others, for he had written against Spinoza, and had not been so successful as John Bredenburg, made use of that copy some time after, to accuse him of Atheism; he published it in Dutch with some reflections. Bredenburg defended himself in the same language; several pieces were published on both sides which I have not read, for I do not understand Dutch. Orobio a Jew, who was an able physician, and Aubert de Verse, engaged in that quarrel, and sided with Cuper. They maintained that the author of the demonstration was a Spinozist, and consequently an Atheist. As far as I have been able to understand by what I have heard, the latter defended himself by alleging the common distinction between faith and reason. He pretended that as the Protestants and the Catholics believe the mystery of the Trinity, though inconsistent with the light of nature; he believed free-will, though reason afforded him strong proofs that every thing happens by an unavoidable necessity, and consequently that there can be no religion; it is no easy thing to drive a man out of such an entrenchment. It may be said that he is not sincere, and that it is impossible to believe as a truth, what is contrary to a geometrical demonstration: but can this be said without setting yourself up for a judge in a case wherein incompetency may be objected against you? Have we a right to decide what passes in other men’s hearts? Have we a sufficient knowledge of a man’s soul, to be positive that such and such combinations cannot be found in it? Have we not many instances of absurd combinations, and such as come nearer to a contradiction than that which John Bredenburg alleged?

It ought in fact to be observed that there is no contradiction between these two things; first, Reason teaches me that this is false; and yet I believe it because I am persuaded that reason is not infallible; and second, I had rather follow an inward sense and the impressions of conscience, in short, the word of God, than a metaphysical demonstration. This is not believing and disbelieving at the same time, one and the same thing; such a combination is impossible, and no man ought to be admitted to allege it for his vindication. However it be, the man I speak of made it appear that the sense of religion and the hopes of another life, prevailed in his soul against his demonstration; and I have been told that the marks he gave of it during his last sickness, put his sincerity out of all doubt. The abbot de Dangeau speaks of some men whose religion is in their mind and not in their heart; they are persuaded of the truth of it, but their conscience is not affected with the love of God. I think it may likewise be said that there are some men whose religion is in their heart and not in their mind. They lose sight of it when they make use of reason to come to the knowledge of it; it escapes the subtleties and sophisms of their logic; they know not which way to turn whilst they proclaim the arguments pro and con: but when they leave off disputing, and mind only their inward sense, the instinct of conscience, the power of education, &c. they are persuaded there is a religion, and conform their lives to it as much as human infirmities can permit. This was the case of Cicero: one can hardly doubt it who compares his other books with those De Natura Deorum, wherein he makes Cotta triumph over all the interlocutors who maintained the existence of the gods.

Whoever desires to know the shifts and

equivocations made use of by Spinoza to conceal his Atheism, need only read Christian Kortholt's book, “De tribus Impostoribus magnis," Viz. Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Thomas Hobbes, and Benedict Spinoza. ¹¹⁸ printed at Kiel in 1680, in 12mo. The author has there collected several passages of Spinoza, and among other things, the letter wherein he complains that there was a report that he had a book in the press to prove that there is no God. It is not so easy to answer all the difficulties contained in the “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,” as utterly to destroy the system of his “Opera Posthuma;” for it is the most absurd and monstrous hypothesis that can be imagined, and the most contrary to the most evident notions of our mind. He supposes that there is but onto substance in nature, and that this only substance is endowed with infinite attributes, and among others with extension and thought. Afterwards he affirms, that “all bodies in the universe are modifications of that substance as it is extended; and that, for instance, the souls of men are modifications of that substance as it thinks: so that God, the necessary and most perfect Being, is the cause of all things that exist, but does not differ from them. There is but one Being and one nature, and that Being produces in itself and by an immanent action, whatever goes by the name of creatures. He is at once both agent and patient, efficient cause and subject; He produces nothing but what is his own modification.” This is the most extravagant hypothesis that can be thought of. The most infamous things sang by the heathen poets against Jupiter, and against Venus, do not come near the horrid notion Spinoza gives us of God: for· the poets did not ascribe to the gods all the crimes that are committed, all the infirmities of mankind: but, according to Spinoza, there is no other agent nor other patient but God, with respect to physical and moral evil. Let us observe some of the absurdities of his system:

It is impossible that the universe should be the only substance; for whatever is extended must necessarily consist of parts, and whatever consists of parts must be compounded: and as the parts of extension do not subsist one in another, it necessarily follows that extension in general is not a substance, or that each part of extension is a particular substance, and distinct from all others. But according to Spinoza, extension in general is the attribute of a substance. He owns, as all other philosophers do, that the attribute of a substance does not really differ from that substance; and therefore he must acknowledge that extension in general is a substance; whence it ought to be concluded that each part of extension is a particular substance; which overthrows the foundation of the whole system of that author. He cannot say that extension in general is distinct from the substance of God; for should he say so, it would follow that this substance is in itself unextended: and therefore it could never have acquired the three dimensions but by creating them, since it is manifest that extension cannot proceed from an unextended subject, but by way of creation, and Spinoza did not believe that any thing could be made out of nothing. Again, it is manifest, that a substance unextended by its nature, can never become the subject of the three dimensions; for how could they be placed upon a mathematical point? They would therefore subsist without a subject; and therefore they would be a substance: so that if this author admitted a real distinction between the substance of God and extension in general, he would be obliged to say that God is composed of two substances distinct one from another, viz. of his unextended being, and of extension. Thus he is obliged to acknowledge that extension and God are but one

and the same thing; and besides, as he maintains that there is But one substance in the universe, he must needs teach that extension is a simple being, and as much compounded as mathematical points. But is not this a most ridiculous assertion, and contrary to our most distinct ideas? Is it more evident that the number one thousand is made up of a thousand units, than it is evident that a body of a hundred inches is made up of a hundred parts really distinct one from another, each of which has the extension of an inch?

It were in vain to raise any objections against our imagination and our senses; for the most intellectual and the most immaterial notions discover to us, with the utmost evidence, that there is a most real distinction between things, one of which has a property which the other has not. The school-men have been very successful in showing the characters and infallible signs of distinction. “When,” say they, “we may affirm of one thing what cannot be affirmed of another, these two things are distinct: things that may be separated one from another, either with respect to time, or with respect to place, are distinct: If we apply those characters to the twelve inches of the foot of extension, we shall find a true distinction between them.” I can affirm of the fifth, that it is contiguous to the sixth, and I can deny it of the first and second, &c. I can remove the sixth to the place of the twelfth, and therefore it may be separated from the fifth. Observe, that Spinoza cannot deny that the characters of distinction made use of by the school-men are very just; for it is by these characters he acknowledges that stones and animals are not the same modification of the infinite Being. “He acknowledges therefore,” will they say, “that there is some difference between things.” He must needs own it, for he was not so extravagant as to believe that there was no difference between him and the jew who gave him a stab with a knife; or to say, that his bed and his chamber were in all respects

the same being with the emperor of China. What did he say then? He taught not that two trees are two parts of extension, but only two modifications. You will be surprised that he spent so many years in forging a new system, since one of the main pillars of it was to be the pretended difference between the word part and the word modification· Could he expect any advantage from this change of a word? What signifies it whether be decline to use the word part, and substitute the word modification in the room of it? Will the notions annexed to the word part vanish away? Will they not be applied to the word modification? Are the signs and characters of difference less real or evident, when matter is divided into modifications, than when it is divided into parts? Not at all. The idea of matter still remains the idea of a compound being, of a system of several substances. This will be fully proved by what lam going to say.

Modifications are beings which cannot exist without the substance they modify; and therefore there ought to be a substance wherever there are modifications; nay, it must needs be multiplied in proportion as modifications inconsistent one with another are multiplied: so that, wherever there are five or six such modifications there are also five or six substances. It is evident, and no Spinozist can deny it, that the square and the circular figures cannot be in the same piece of wax; and therefore the substance modified by a square figure is not the same substance with that which is modified by the circular figure. When therefore I see a round table and a square table in a room, I may affirm that the extension which is the subject of the round table is a substance distinct from the extension, which is the subject of the other table; for otherwise the square figure and the round figure would be at the same time in one and the same subject: which is impossible. Iron and water, wine and wood are incompatible; and therefore they require distinct

subjects. The lower end of a stake driven into a river is not the same modification with the other end: it is surrounded with earth, whilst the other is surrounded with water; and therefore they have two contradictory attributes, viz. being surrounded with water, and not being surrounded with water: therefore the subject they modify must be at least two substances; for one only substance cannot be at the same time modified by an accident surrounded with water, and by an accident not surrounded with water. This shows that extension is made up of as many distinct substances as there are modifications.

If it be an absurd thing to say that God is extended, because it in depriving him of his simplicity, and ascribing, to him an infinite number of parts; what shall we say when we consider that this opinion reduces him to the condition of matter, the vilest of all beings, and such as most of the ancient philosophers have placed immediately next to nothing. Matter is the stage of all sorts of changes, the field of battle of contrary causes, the subject of all corruptions, and of all generations; in a word, there is no being whose nature is more inconsistent with the immutability of God. And yet the Spinozists maintain that it suffers no division: and the reason they allege for it, is the most frivolous and most silly cavilling in the world. They pretend that if matter were divided, one of its portions should be separated from the other by empty spaces, which never happens. This is certainly a very wrong definition of division. We are as really separated from our friends, when the space that divides us is taken up by other men placed abreast, as if it were foil of earth: and therefore, when the Spinozists maintain that matter, reduced into ashes and smoke is not actually divided, they advance a thing quite contrary to our notions and manner of speaking: but what will they get, if we should lay aside the advantage we may

draw from their wrong defining division? There will remain still many proofs of the mutability and corruptibility of the god of Spinoza. All men have a very clear idea of an immutable Being: they understand by that word, a Being which never requires any thing new; which never loses what it is once possessed of; which is always the same, both with respect to its substance and to the manner of its Being. The clearness of this idea enables us to apprehend most distinctly what a mutable Being is: it is not only a Being, whose existence may begin and have an end; but a being which always subsisting as to its substance, may successively acquire several modifications, and lose the accidents or forms which, it once had. All the ancient philosophers have acknowledged, that the continual series of generations and corruptions which is observed in the world, neither produces nor destroys any portion of matter: hence it is, that the said matter is ingenerable and incorruptible as to its substance, though it be the subject of all generations and all corruptions. The same matter which is fire now was wood before; all its essential attributes remain the same under the form of wood, and under the form of fire: and therefore it loses and acquires nothing but accidents and modes, when wood is changed into fire, bread into flesh, flesh into earth, &c. And yet it is the most sensible and the most proper example that can be given of a mutable Being, and actually liable to all sorts of alterations and internal changes. I call them internal; for the different forms under which it exists are not like the different clothes upon which actors appear upon the stage. The bodies of those actors may subsist without any manner of change or alteration under a thousand different dresses: cloth and linen, silk and gold, are not united with the man that wears them; they are still foreign bodies and outward ornaments; but the forms produced in matter are inwardly and penetratively united to it: it is their subject of inherence, and according to right philosophy there is no other distinction between them and matter than what is to be found between modes and a thing modified. From whence it follows, that the god of the Spinozists is a being actually changing, that goes continually through several states internally and really different one from another. It is not therefore the most perfect being, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Jam. i, 17. ¹¹⁹

Observe, that the Proteus mentioned by the poets, their Thetis, their Vertumnus, who were images and examples of inconstancy, and which occasioned the proverbs whereby the oddest fickleness of men was denoted, would have been immutable gods, if the god of the Spinozists were immutable; for it was never pretended that there happened any alteration in their substance, but only new modifications.

Verum, ubi correptum manibus, vinclisque tenebris,
Tùm variae illudent species, atque ora ferarum:
Fiet enim subitò sus horridus, atraque tigris,
Squamosusque draco, et fulvâ cervice leæna:
Aut acrem flammae sonitum dabit, atque ita vinclis
Excidit: aut in aquas tenues delapsus abibit.
Sed, quanto ille magis formas se vertet in omnes,
Tantò, nate magis, contende tenacia vincla:
Donec talis erit mutato corpore, qualem
Videris, incepto tegeret cùm lumina somno.

Virgil. Georg. lib. iv, ver. 405.

Thus surely bound, yet be not over bold,
The slippery god will try to loose his hold.
And various forms assume to cheat thy sight;
And with vain images of beasts affright.
With foamy tusks will seem a bristly boar
Or imitate the lion’s angry roar;
Break out in crackling names to shun thy snares,
Or hiss a dragon, or a tyger stares:

Or with a wile thy caution to betray,
In fleeting streams attempt to slide away.
But thou, the more be varies forms, beware
To strain his fetters with a stricter care.
Till tiring all his arts, he turns again
To his true shape, in which he first was seen.

Dryden.

As for what concerns Thetis, see Ovid; Ovid. Metam. lib. xi, Fab. vii, ver. 221 et seq. ¹²⁰ see also the same poet concerning Vertumnus, Id. Ibid. lib. xiv, Fab. xvi, ver. 647, et seq. ¹²¹ and besides consult the fourth book of Propertius in the second Elegy.

III. We shall see still more monstrous absurdities, if we consider the god of Spinoza as being the subject of all the modifications of thought. The combination of extension and thought, in one and the same substance, is already one great difficulty; for the question is not about a mixture like that of metals, or that of wine and water, which requires only a juxtaposition; but the combination of thought and extension ought to be an identity; thought and extension are two attributes identified with substance. They are therefore identified among themselves, by the fundamental and essential rule of human logic. I am sure that if Spinoza had found the same intricacy in another sect, he would have thought it unworthy of his attention; but he did not much trouble himself with it in his own cause: so true it is that the most disdainful censurers of other men’s thoughts, are very indulgent to themselves. Doubtless he derided the mystery of the Trinity, and wondered that so many · people should speak of a nature terminated by three hypostases; and yet, properly speaking, he ascribed as many persons to the divine nature as there are men upon earth. He looked upon those as fools who believed transubstantiation, and who say that a man may be in many places in one and the same time,

may be alive in Paris and dead at Rome, &c. and yet he maintains that the extended substance, thought but one and indivisible, is all at once every where, cold in one place, hot in another, melancholy in one place, merry in another, &c.: this by and by, but mind what I am going to say: if there be any thing certain and undeniable in human knowledge, it is this proposition: “Opposita sunt quæ neque de se invicem, neque de eodem tertio secundem idem, ad idem, eodem modo atque tempore vere affirmari possunt.” That is, two opposite terms cannot be truly affirmed of the same subject in the same respects, and at the same time. For instance, we cannot say, without lying, “Peter is well, Peter is sick: he denies that, and he affirms it ,” supposing that the terms have always the same relation, and are taken in the same sense. The Spinozists destroy that idea, and falsify it in such a manner that I do not know whence they can take the character of truth: for if such propositions Were false, there is none that can be warranted to be true: and therefore it is vain to dispute with them; for if they deny this, they may as Well deny any other reason alleged against them. I shall make it appear that this axiom is very false in their system; and in order to it, I lay down first of all this undeniable maxim, that all the names that are given to a subject, to signify what it does or what it suffers, properly and physically belong to its substance, and not to its accidents. When we say, iron is hard, iron is heavy, it sinks into water, it cleaves wood, we do not pretend to say that its hardness is hard, its heaviness is heavy, &c. This would be an impertinent way of speaking: we mean that the extended substance it is made of resists, is heavy, goes down into water and cleaves wood. In like manner, when we say that a man denies, affirms, is angry, is kind, praises, &c, we ascribe all those attributes to the substance of his soul, and not to his thoughts, as they are accidents or modifications: and therefore were it true, as Spinoza will have it, that men are modifications of God, we should speak falsely should we say, Peter denies this, he wills that, he affirms such a thing; for, according to that system, it is properly God who denies, who wills, who affirms, and consequently all the denominations resulting from the thoughts of all men, do properly and physically belong to the substance of God. Whence it follows that God hates and loves, denies and affirms, the same things at the same time, and according to all the conditions requisite, to make the rule I have mentioned concerning opposite terms false: for it cannot be denied that, according to those conditions strictly taken, some men love and affirm what other men hate and deny. I will go farther still; the contradictory terms to will and not to will, belong at the same time to different men according to all those conditions; and therefore, according to Spinoza’s system, they belong to that sole and indivisible substance he calls God. It is therefore God who at the same time forms an act of will, and does not form it with respect to the same object. And therefore, two contradictory terms are true of him, which overthrow the first principle of metaphysics.

I am not ignorant that, in disputes concerning transubstantiation, a cavil is made use of which might help the Spinozists. It is said that if Peter will a thing at Rome which he does not will at Paris, the contradictory terms to will and not to will, are not true with respect to him; for since it is supposed he wills at Rome, it were a lie to say he wills not. I leave them this vain subtilty, and shall only say that, as a square circle is a contradiction, a substance is so too, when it loves and hates the same object at the same time. A square circle would be and would not be a circle; which is a plain contradiction: it would be a circle according to the supposition, and it would be no circle, since the circular figure is wholly

inconsistent with the square figure. I say the same of a substance that loves and hates the same thing: it loves and does not love it; this is a downright contradiction; it loves it according to the supposition; it does not love it, since hatred does essentially exclude love. Thus you see what it is to be over nice. Spinoza could not bear the least obscurity of Peripatetism, Judaism, or Christianity; and yet he heartily embraced a hypothesis which reconciles two things so contrary to one another, as the square and the circular figures, and whereby an infinite number of inconsistent attributes, and all the variety and antipathy of the thoughts of mankind are made true and consistent at the same time, in one and the same most simple and indivisible substance. We commonly say, " quot capita tot sensus, as many men so many minds;” but according to Spinoza, all the minds or thoughts of men are in one head. The bare relating of such things is a sufficient confutation of them, and clearly shows they are contradictory; for it is manifest either that nothing is impossible, not even that two and two should make twelve, or that there are in the universe as many substances as subjects, which cannot receive at the same time the same denominations.

IV. But if it be, physically speaking, a prodigious absurdity, that a simple and only being should be modified at the same time by the thoughts of all men, it is an execrable abomination if it be considered with regard to morality. How then? Shall not the infinite, the necessary, the most perfect Being be steady, constant, and immutable? Why do I say, immutable? it will not be one moment the same; its thoughts will continually succeed one another; the same odd mixture of passions and sentiments will never happen twice. This is hard to be digested, but here is something worse. This continual changeableness will be very uniform in this sense, that for one good thought, the infinite Being Will have a thousand foolish,

extravagant, filthy, and abominable . It will produce in it self all the follies idle fancies, leud and unjust practices of mankind; it will be not only the efficient cause of them, but also the passive subject, the “subjectum inhæsionis:” it will be united to them by the most intimate union that can be conceived, for it is a penetrative union, or rather a perfect identity, since the modification is not really distinct from the modified substance. Several great philosophers not being able to apprehend how the most perfect. Being can permit that man should be so wicked and so unhappy, have supposed two principles, the one good, and the other bad; but here is a philosopher who is pleased, to make God himself the agent and patient, the cause and subject of all the crimes and miseries of men. If men hate and assassinate one another; if they form themselves into armies to kill one another; if the conquerors eat sometimes the conquered, it is a thing that maybe apprehended, because it is supposed they are distinct one from another, and that meum and tuum produce contrary passions in them. But to affirm that men are only the modification of one and the same Being, that, consequently, God only acts, and that the same individual God being modified into Turks and Hungarians, there are wars and battles, is to advance a thing more monstrous and chimerical than all the deliriums of men shut up in mad houses. Take

particular notice, as I have said before, that modes do nothing, and that substances only act and suffer. This phrase, “the sweetness of honey pleases the palate,” is only true, as it signifies that the extended substance of which honey is made up pleases the palate. Thus, according to Spinoza’s system, whoever says, “The Germans have killed ten thousand Turks,” speaks improperly and falsely, unless he means God modified into Germans has killed God modified into ten thousand Turks. And therefore all the phrases made use of to express what men do one against another

have no other true sense than this: God hates himself; he asks favours of himself, and he refuses them to himself; he persecutes himself, kills himself, eats himself, calumniates himself, executes himself, &c. This would be less incomprehensible, if Spinoza had represented God as a collection of many distinct parts; but he reduces him to the most perfect simplicity, to a unity of substance, to indivisibility. And therefore he asserts the most infamous and the maddest extravagances that can be conceived, infinitely more ridiculous than those of the Poets, concerning the gods of the Heathens. I wonder he either did not perceive them, or if he did, how he persisted obstinately in his principle. A man of sense would rather chuse to grub up a piece of ground with his teeth and nails, than to cultivate such an offensive and absurd hypothesis.

V. Here follow two other objections. Some philosophers have been so impious as to deny the being of a God; but they did not carry their extravagance so far as to say, that if he did exist, he would not be perfectly happy. The greatest sceptics among the ancients said, that all men have an idea of God, according to which he is a living, happy, and incorruptible being, of a perfect felicity, and susceptible of no evil. Happiness was the most inseparable property contained in this idea; those who deprived him of power and the direction of the world, acknowledged his felicity and immortal beatitude.

Omnia enim per se Divum natura necesse est
Immortali ævo summa cum pace fruatur,
Semota ab nostris rebus sejunctaque longe;
Nam privata dolore omni, privata periclis,
Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nihil indiga nostri,
Nec bene promeritis capitur, nec tangitur ira.

Lucretius, lib. i. ver. 57.

#For whatsoe’r’s divine must live in peace,
In undisturb’d and everlasting ease;

Not care for us, from fears and dangers free,
Sufficient to its own felicity:
Nought here below, nought in our power it needs;
Ne’er smiles at good, ne’er frowns at wicked deeds.

Creech.

Those who made him subject to death, said at least, that he was happy all his life-time. It was, doubtless, a horrid extravagance not to ascribe immorality as well as happiness to the Divine Nature. Plutarch does very well confute this absurdity of the Stoics. I shall set down his words somewhat at large because they prove a thought, which I have advanced above, and because they confute the Spinozists; for his argument is inconsistent with the hypothesis, according to which God is subject to death, as to his parts or modalities, that he is, as it were, the matter of generations and corruptions; that he destroys his own modalities; and that he supports himself with that destruction. “And, indeed, we may happen to meet with barbarous and savage men, who believe that there is no God. But there was never found any man, who, believing that there was no God, did not at the same time believe him incorruptible and eternal. For those who are called Atheists, such as Theodorus, Diagoras, and Hyppo, did not dare to say that God was corruptible; they, indeed, believed that there was nothing exempt from corruption: while they denied that no being was incorruptible, they determined nothing concerning God. But Chrysippus and Cleanthes having filled (as one may say) the heavens, the earth, the air, the sea with gods, affirmed that none of these gods were incorruptible or eternal: they excepted Jupiter only, into whom they thought that all the other gods were dissolved, and they made him decay, which is no better than perishing. For as it implies a weakness and defect in one being to perish and be dissolved into another, so it implies a weakness and defect in that other being to be nourished and preserved by the former dissolving into it.”

But though this doctrine of the Stoics was so extravagant, it did not deprive the gods of happiness during their life. Perhaps the Spinozists are the only men, who have made the Deity subject to misery. But what misery? A misery so great that he falls into despair, and would annihilate himself if he could; he endeavours to do it; he deprives himself of as many things as he can; he hangs himself, he throws himself headlong down a precipice, being no longer able to bear the terrible melancholy that consumes . him. This is not declamation, it is an exact and philosophical language; for if man be only a modification, he does nothing: it were an impertinent, ridiculous, and burlesque expression to say, “Joy is merry, sadness is sad.” It is a phrase no less impertinent in Spinoza’s system, to affirm, “man thinks, man afflicts himself, man hangs himself, &c.” All those propositions ought to be affirmed of the substance, whereof man is only a mode. How could Spinoza think that an independent and self-existent being, endowed with infinite perfections, is subject to all the miseries incident to mankind? If some other being forced it to vex itself, and to feel pain, its striving to make itself unhappy would be less surprizing; one might say, it must needs obey a stronger power; it is likely it torments itself with the gravel, the cholic, a fever, and madness, to avoid a greater evil. But it is the only being in the universe; there is nothing that commands, exhorts, or intreats it. It is its own nature, will Spinoza say, that moves it under some circumstances, to give itself a great deal of vexation, and a very violent pain. But I will ask him whether he does not find something monstrous and inconceivable in such a fatality.

The strong reasons alleged against those who maintained that our souls are a portion of God, are still more solid against Spinoza. It is objected against Pythagoras, in a piece of Cicero, that three palpable.

falsities result from that doctrine: 1. That the Divine Nature would be torn in pieces. 2. That it would be miserable whenever men are so. 3. That man’s mind would be ignorant of nothing, since it would be God. “Nam Pythagoras qui censuit, &c.”

VI. Were it not that I remember I do not write a book against this man, but only some short observations by the by, I could find many other absurdities in his system. I shall conclude with this. He engaged in an hypothesis, which makes all his labours ridiculous, and I am sure that every page of his Ethics affords a horrid piece of nonsense. First, I would fain know whom he has in view, when he rejects some doctrines and proposes others. Does he design to teach some truths? Would he confute some errors? But how can he say that there are any errors among men? Are not the thoughts of the common philosophers those of the Jews, those of the Christians, modes of the Infinite Being, as well as those of his ethics? Are they not realities as necessary to the perfection of the universe, as all his speculations? Do they not arise from the necessary cause? How then can he pretend that they want to be rectified?

In the second place, does he not say that the nature, whereof they are modalities, acts necessarily, and always follows its course; that it can neither turn aside nor stop, and that being the only nature in the universe, no outward cause will ever stop or rectify it?

And therefore nothing can be more needless than the instructions of this philosopher. Does it become him, who is but the modification of a substance, to prescribe to the Infinite Being what it ought to do? Will that Being hear him? And if it should hear him, could it be the better for what he says? Does it not always act according to the whole extent of its power, without knowing either whither it goes, or what it does? Such a man as Spinoza would set his mind at rest, if he reasoned well. If it be possible, would

he say, for such a doctrine to take root, the necessity of nature will establish it without my book; if it be not possible, all my writings will be insignificant.

They who complain that the authors who have undertaken to confute Spinoza have not been successful, confound things; they would have the difficulties, under which he sank, wholly removed; but they should be contented to see his hypothesis entirely overthrown. I think it may be supposed that he ran into these absurdities because he could not apprehend either that matter is eternal, and different from God, or that it has been produced out of nothing, or that an infinite mind, perfectly free, and the Creator of all things, could produce such a work as the world. A matter that necessarily exists, and yet is destitute of activity, and subject to the power of another principle, is a thing that does not suit with reason. We see no affinity between those three qualities; such a combination is repugnant to the idea of order. A matter created out of nothing cannot be conceived, though we strive never so much to form an idea of an act of will, which changes into a real substance what was nothing before. This principle of the ancients, “ex nihilo, nihil fit—nothing is made of nothing,” offers itself continually to our imagination, and there appears with such evidence, that it stops us short in case we have begun to frame any conception of creation. Lastly, that a God, infinitely good, infinitely holy, infinitely free, who could make creatures always holy, and always happy, should rather chuse to make them criminal, and eternally miserable, is a thing that shocks reason, and so much the more, because it cannot reconcile man’s free will with the quality of a being created out of nothing. But unless those two things be reconciled, it cannot conceive how man deserves any punishment under a free, good, holy, and just Providence. These three inconveniences put Spinoza upon looking for a new system.

wherein God should not be distinct from matter, and should act necessarily, and according to the whole extent of his power, not out of himself, but in himself. It results from this supposition, that this necessary cause, whose power is not limited, and whose actions are not directed by goodness, justice, and knowledge, but only by the infinite power of its nature, must needs have modified itself according to all possible realities, so that errors and vices, pain and grief, being modalities as real as truth, virtue, and pleasure, all those things must have been in the universe. Spinoza hoped to resolve by that means the objections of the Manichees against the one only principle. Those objections have no force but on the supposition that one only principle of all things acts by choice, and can act or forbear acting, and confines its power according to the rules of goodness and equity, or according to the instinct of malice. This being Boëthius, de Consolat. Philosoph. lib. i. Prusa iv. pag. m. ¹²² supposed, the question is, if that one only principle be good, whence comes evil? If it be bad, whence comes good? “Deteriora velle, nostri fuerit fortasse defec tus: posse vero contra innocentiam, quae sceleratus quisque conceperit, inspectante Deo, monstri simile est: unde haud injuria tuorum quidam familiarium quæsivit: Si quidem Deus, inquit est, unde mala? bona vero unde, si non est.—To have a will to do evil, is, perhaps, our defect; but for a villain, in the sight of God, to do against an innocent man whatever he devises, is a thing monstrous. Hence one of your friends asked, and not without reason, “If there be a God, whence comes evil; and if there be no God, whence comes good?” Spinoza would answer, my one only principle being able to do good and evil, and doing whatever it can do, good and evil must necessarily be in the world. But if you consider the three inconveniences he intended to avoid, and the extravagant consequences of his hypothesis, you will find that his choice is neither that of a good man, nor that of a man of parts. He lays aside some things, of which, the worst that can be said is, that the weakness of our reason does not allow us clearly to perceive the possibility of them, and he admits others which are evidently impossible. There is a great difference between not comprehending the possibility of a thing, and comprehending the impossibility of it. Now see the injustice of readers. They require from all those who write against Spinoza, that they should remove the difficulties which perplexed him, and set in a clear light the truths he could not comprehend; and because they find no such thing in the writings of the anti-Spinozists, they declare they have not succeeded. Is it not sufficient to overthrow the system of that Atheist, Reason teaches us that custom ought to be maintained against innovators, unless they bring in better laws? That if their opinions were not better than those that are commonly received, they would deserve to be rejected, though they were not worse than the abuses they intended to suppress. It ought to be said to those men, submit to custom, or give us something better. Much more ought we to reject the system of the Spinozists, since, in freeing us from some difficulties, it involves us in more inextricable perplexities. If the difficulties were equal on both sides, the common system should be preferred to the other, because, besides the privilege of possession, it hath also this advantage, that it promises us a great happiness for the time to come, and affords us a thousand comforts in the miseries of this life. How great a satisfaction is it in our adversity to hope that

God will hear our prayers, and that, if he do not hear them, he will, however, reward our patience, and indemnify us in a glorious manner? It is a great comfort to flatter ourselves that other men will have

some regard to the dictates of their conscience, and to the fear of God. Wherefore the common hypothesis is both truer and more agreeable than the atheistical. Therefore, since the system of Spinoza is not liable to lesser objections than the Christian hypothesis, it is a sufficient reason to reject it So that any author, who shews that Spinozism is obscure, and false in its first propositions, and perplexed with impenetrable and contradictory absurdities in its consequences, ought to pass for having very well confuted it, though he does not clearly resolve all the objections of Spinoza. The whole matter may be reduced to these few words. The common hypothesis, if compared with that of the Spinozists in those things that are clear, has a greater evidence; and if it be compared with the other in those things that are obscure, it appears less opposite to the light of reason. And besides, it promises us an infinite happiness after this life, and procures us a thousand comforts in this, whereas the other gives us no prospect of a future happiness, and deprives us of confidence in our prayers, and of the advantage we may expect from the remorses of our neighbours; and therefore the common hypothesis is to be preferred to the other.

The greatest admirers acknowledge, that if he had taught the doctrines laid to his charge, he would be an execrable man; but they pretend he has not been understood. “If therefore, it were the intention of this philosopher to confound God and nature together, in so shameful a manner, or if his opinion come to that, I think he was justly attacked and condemned by his adversaries, nay, that his memory ought to be for ever execrable; but because God alone, who is the searcher of hearts, can judge of any man’s intention, it only belongs to us to judge of the opinions contained in the writings which this man has published; and though there are some among his adversaries of great penetration, yet I think they have not

at all discovered the true sense of his writings, because I find nothing in them but what abundantly shews that he was far from confounding God and nature together. At least, I judge so from Ins writings, which if others understand better than I do, I retract what I now say; I do not take it upon me to protect this man, I only ask that the liberty which is granted others, may likewise be granted me, which is that I may be allowed to explain what I take to be the genuine sense of these writings.” Kuffelaer Speciminis Artis ratiocinandi naturalis et arti ficialis, pag. 113. ¹²³

These words, taken from a book of one of his followers, printed at Utrecht in 1684, dearly shew that Spinoza has been so successfully confuted by his adversaries, that the only way of replying to them, is like that of the Jansenists against the Jesuits, viz. That his opinion is not such as it is supposed to be. This is the result of what his apologist says. And therefore in order to shew that his adversaries have attained a complete victory over him, we need only consider that he has in effect taught what is imputed to him, or that he contradicted himself wretchedly, and knew not what he said. He is accused of teaching that all particular beings are modifications of God. This is plainly his doctrine, since his fourteenth proposition runs thus: “Præter Deum nulla dari neque concipi potent substantia: --- Besides God, no substance can exist, nor be conceived.” And he affirms in the fifteenth, “Quicquid est, in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo esse neque concipi potest: --- Whatever exists is in God, and nothing can exist nor be conceived without God:” which he proves by this reason, that every thing is a mode or a substance, and that modes can neither exist nor be conceived without a substance. When therefore an apologist speaks in this manner, were it true that Spinoza teaches that all

particular beings are modes of the divine substance, I would not deny that his adversaries have obtained a complete victory over him; I only deny the fact; I do not believe that the doctrine they have very well confuted is contained in his book; I say, when an apologist speaks in such a manner, he had as good own that his hero has been defeated; for certainly the doctrine in question is in Spinoza’s Ethics.

Here I must give an instance of the falsity of his former propositions; it will be of use to show how easy it was to overthrow his system. His fifth proposition contains these words: “In rerum natura non possunt dari duæ aut plures substantiae ejusdem naturae seu attributi.—It is impossible that two or more substances of the same nature or attribute should exist.” This is his “Argumentum achilleum,” and the most steady foundation he builds upon; but at the same time, it is such a wretched sophism, that no scholar, who has read what is called “Parva Logica lia,” or the five “Predicabilia Porphyrii,” could be perplexed with it. All those who teach school-philosophy begin with telling their scholars what genus, species, and individuum are. This lecture is sufficient to put Spinoza to a stand. The following distinction will do the business: “Non possunt dari plures substantiae ejusdem numero naturæ sive attributi, concede; non possunt dari plures substantiae ejusdem specie naturae sive attributi, nego.” What could Spinoza say against this distinction? Must he not admit of it with respect to modifications? Is not man, according to his notion, a species of modification, and is not Socrates an individuum of that species? Would he have us maintain that Benedict Spinoza, and the Jew, who attempted to thrust a knife into his body, were not two modifications, but one only? This might be proved invincibly, if his proof for the unity of substance were a good one: but since it proves too much, for it proves that there is but one modification

in the world, he ought to be one of the first to reject it. He ought therefore to know that the word idem signifies two things, identity and similitude. We say that such a one was both the same day as his father, and died the same day with his mother. With respect to a man born the first of March, 1630, and who died the tenth of February, 1655, whose father was born the first of March, 1610, and whose mother died the tenth of February, 1655. The proportion would be true in the two senses of the word same. It would signify like in the first part of this proposition, but not in the second. Pythagoras and Aristotle, according to Spinoza's system, were two like modifications; each of them had the whole nature of a modification, and yet the one differed from the other. The same may be said of two substances; each of them has the whole nature, and all the attributes of substance, and yet they are not one only substance, but two. I shall set down what a Spaniard says against those who, through a sophism like that of Spinoza, thought that the materia prima did not differ from God. “Who is not surprized that ever there were men so stupid and so blind, amidst the clearest light, as constantly to affirm, and obstinately maintain, that God is the first matter (materia prima). But by what reason did they support so foolish and impious an opinion? ‘ If,' say they, ‘God and the first matter are not the same, therefore they differ from one another. But whatever things differ must necessarily differ in some properties, and therefore they must be composed of those properties wherein they agree, and of those wherein they differ. But there being no composition either in God or the first matter, they cannot differ from one another, therefore they must be one and the same.' Observe how slight an argument leads those men into so grievous an error, or rather madness, who do not understand the distinction between different and diverse, which Aristotle has mentioned.

Those things are different from one another which agree in some properties, and are distinguished in others, as a man and a lion agree in their genus, both being animals, and are distinguished by their proper differences, one being rational, the other not. But those things are diverse, which are distinguished from one another, because they are most simple.” Benedictus Pererius, de commininibus Principiis, lib. v, cap, xii, p. m. 309. ¹²⁴

There are few notions in our mind clearer than that of identity. I grant that it is confounded and very ill applied in the common language: nations, rivers, &c. are accounted the same nations and the same rivers during several ages; the body of a man is accounted the same body for the space of sixty years or more; but those popular and improper expressions, do not deprive us of the certain rule of identity; they do not blot out of our minds this idea: a thing of which one may deny or affirm what cannot be denied or affirmed of another thing, is distinct from that other thing. When all the attributes of time, place, &c. which belong to a thing, belong also to another thing, they are but one being. But notwithstanding the clearness of these ideas, it would be difficult to say how many great philosophers have erred in that point, and reduced all souls and intelligences to unity, though they acknowledged that some were united to bodies to which others were not united. This opinion was so common in Italy in the sixteenth century, that pope Leo X thought himself obliged to condemn it, and to threaten with severe penalties all those that should teach it. Here are the words of the bull, dated the nineteenth of December, 1513: “Cum diebus nostris Zizaniae seminator nonnullos perniciosissimos errores in agro Domini seminare sit ausus, de natura praesertim animae rationalis,

quod videlicet mortalis sit aut unica in cunctis hominibus, et nonnulli temere philosophantes secundum saltem philosophiam verum esse asseverent: contra hoc, sacro approbante concilio, damnamus et reprobamus omnes asserentes, animam intellectivam mortalem esse aut unicam in cunctis hominibus, aut hoc in dubium vertentes: cum illa immortalis, et pro corporum quibus infunditur multitudine singulariter multiplicabilis et multiplicata et multiplicanda sit.... Whereas in our days a sower of tares has dared to sow some most pernicious errors in the field of God, especially concerning the nature of a rational soul; namely that it is mortal, and that there is but one soul in all men; and some rashly philosophizing, have asserted this to be true, at least according to philosophy. In opposition to this, with the approbation of the holy council, we condemn and pronounce to be reprobate all those who assert that the intelligent soul is mortal, or that there is but one soul in all men, or those who. call this in question: since the soul is immortal, and according to the multitude of bodies into which it is infused, may be particularly multiplied, is and must be multiplied.” This was lopping off a considerable branch of Spinozism. I must observe that some philosophers do strangely confound the idea of identity, for they maintain that the parts of matter are not distinct before they are actually separated; nothing can be more absurd.

Spinoza was not sensible of the unavoidable consequences of his own system, for he laughed at the apparition of spirits, and these is no philosopher who has less reason to deny it. He ought to acknowledge that every part of nature thinks, and that as man is not the most knowing and most intelligent modification of the universe, demons must necessarily exist. I have said it in another place; when it is supposed that a most perfect mind has created all

things out of nothing, without being determined to it by his nature, but by the free choice of his own good pleasure, the existence of angels may be denied. If it be asked why such a creator has not produced other spirits besides human souls, the answer will be, that such was his good pleasure, stat pro ratione voluntas; no reasonable reply can be made to this answer unless the fact be proved, I mean that there are angels. But when it is supposed that the Creator did not act freely, and exhausted all his power without any choice or rule, and besides that thinking is one of his attributes, it is a ridiculous thing to assert that there are no demons. According to this system, it ought to be believed the thinking attribute of the Creator has been modified, not only in the bodies of men, but also throughout the whole universe; and that besides the animals which we know, there is an infinite number of others which we know not, and which exceed us in knowledge and in malice, as much as we exceed in that respect dogs and oxen; for it were the most unreasonable thing in the world to fancy that a man’s mind is the most perfect modification that an infinite Being, acting according to the whole extent of its power, could produce. We can conceive no natural connection between the understanding and the brain, and therefore we ought to believe that a creature without brain may as well think, as a creature organized as we are. What is it then that could move Spinoza to deny what is said of spirits? See his Letters lvi, lviii, lx. ¹²⁵ Why did he believe that there is nothing in the world that can excite in our machines the sight of a spectre, make a noise in a room, and produce all the magical phenomena mentioned in books? Was it because he believed that no being can produce such effects, unless it have as bulky a body as that of man; and that therefore the demons could not subsist in the air, nor come into our houses, nor steal away from our sight? But such a thought would be ridiculous; the bulk of flesh of which we are made up, is rather an obstacle than a help to wit and power; I mean a mediate power, or the faculty of applying the most proper instruments for the production of great effects. The most surprising actions of men arise from that faculty, as it appears from thousands of examples. An engineer as little as a dwarf, lean and pale, performs more things than two thousand savages, stronger than Milo, are able to perform. An animate machine a thousand times smaller than an ant, might produce greater effects than an elephant; it might discover the insensible parts of plants and animals, and place itself upon the seat of the first springs of our brain, and open some valves, by which means we might see phantoms, hear a noise, &c. If physicians knew the first fibres and the first combinations of the parts in vegetables, minerals, and animals, they would also know the instruments proper to put them out of order, and might apply those instruments in such a manner as to place those parts in a new order,;

whereby good meat would be turned into poison, and poison into good meat. Such physicians would be incomparably more knowing than Hippocrates; and were they little enough to get into the brain and the entrails, they might cure any body, and also produce whenever they pleased, the most strange diseases that can be seen. The whole may be brought to this question: Is it possible that an invisible modification should be more knowing and malicious than man? If Spinoza deny it, he knows not the consequences of his hypothesis, and acts rashly and without principles. A man might make a long dissertation upon this subject, wherein he might prevent all Spinoza’s subterfuges and objections.

The disputes of the Spinozists about miracles is a mere quibble. The common opinion of orthodox

divines is, that God produces miracles immediately, whether he makes use of creatures as agents or not. In either case it undeniably appears that he is above nature; for if he produce something without employing other causes, he does not want the help of nature, and he never employs them in a miracle, but after he has diverted them from their usual course; and therefore he shows that they depend on his will, that he suspends their power when he pleases, or applies it in a different manner from their ordinary determination. The Cartesians, who make him the immediate cause of all the effects of nature, suppose, that when he works miracles, he does not observe the general laws he has established; he makes an exception, and applies bodies quite otherwise than he would do, if he followed the general laws. Whereupon they say, that if there were any general laws whereby God had engaged to move bodies according to the desires of angels; and if an angel had desired that the waters of the Red Sea should be divided, the passage of the Israelites would not be a miracle properly so called. This consequence, which necessarily arises from their principles, makes their definition of a miracle less convenient than it were to be wished, and therefore it were better for them to say, that all the effects, contrary to the general laws we know, are miracles; and by this means the plagues of Egypt, and such other extraordinary actions related in scripture, will be miracles properly speaking. Now, in order to show the insincerity and the illusions of the Spinozists upon this head, we need only say that when they deny the possibility of miracles, they allege this reason, that God and nature are the same being; so that if God did something against the laws of nature, he would act against himself, which is impossible. Speak plainly and without any ambiguity; say, that the laws of nature being not made by a free legislator who knew what he did, but being the action of a blind and necessary cause, nothing can happen that is contrary to those laws; if so, you allege your own position against miracles, which is a petitio principii; but however, you speak plainly. Let us bring them off from this general reasoning, and ask them what they think of the miracles mentioned in the scripture; they will absolutely deny all those which they cannot ascribe to a cunning trick. Not to insist upon denying such facts, I shall only argue against them by their own principles. Do not we say that the power of nature is infinite? But would it be infinite, if there were nothing in the whole universe that could restore a dead man to life? Would it be infinite, if there were but one way of forming man, viz. that of ordinary generation? Do not we say that the knowledge of nature is infinite? We deny that divine understanding, in which we believe the knowledge of all possible beings to be reunited; but by dispersing the knowledge we do not deny its infinity; and therefore we ought to say that nature knows all things, much in the same manner as we say that man understands all languages; one man does not understand them all, but some understand one and some another. Can we affirm that the universe contains nothing which knows the construction of our bodies? If we can affirm it, we contradict ourselves; we can say no longer that the knowledge of God is infinitely divided; the contrivance of our organs would be unknown to him; we must therefore acknowledge if we argue consequentially, that some modification knows it; we must acknowledge that it is very possible for nature to bring a dead man to life, and that Spinoza confounded his ideas and knew not the consequences of his principle, when he said that if he could believe the resurrection of Lazarus, he would break his system to pieces, and willingly embrace the Christian faith. contradict their own hypothesis, when they deny the possibility of miracles; I mean (to avoid all ambiguity) the possibility of the facts mentioned in the Holy Scripture.

It is said that Spinoza died fully persuaded of his Atheism, and that he took some precaution to conceal his inconstancy, if there should be occasion for it; I mean he took care that in case of the approach of death, or the symptoms of his illness should make him speak against his system, no suspected person should be witness of it. The case is this, or at least we find the following account of it in a printed book: Pensées diverses sur les Cometes, num. 181. ¹²⁶ “Perhaps it will be said that Atheists are not greedy of praise; but what can any man do more than was done by Spinoza a little before he died? The thing is of a fresh date, and I have it from a great man who had it from good hands; he was the greatest Atheist that ever lived, and he grew so fond of certain philosophical principles, that the better to meditate upon them, he confined himself to a close retirement, renouncing all the pleasures and vanities of the world, and minding nothing but those abstruse meditations. Being upon the point of death he sent for his landlady, and desired her not to suffer that any minister should see him in that condition. His reason for it was, as his friends said, that he had a mind to die without disputing, and was afraid that the weakness of his senses might make him say something inconsistent with his principles; that is, he was afraid it would be said in the world that his conscience awakening at the sight of death, had damped his courage and made him renounce his opinions.”

A preface, which I have already quoted above, which contains some circumstances of the death of Spinoza, says nothing of this. I find in it that he told his landlord who was going to church; “I hope

you will return, God willing, and speak with me when the sermon is over;'' but he died quietly before his landlord returned, and nobody saw him die but a physician of Amsterdam. For the rest we are told in that preface, that he was extremely desirous to immortalize his name, and would have willingly sacrificed his life for it, though in order to obtain it he had been torn in pieces by the mob.

Had Spinoza reasoned consequentially, he would not have called the fear of hell a chimerical thing. Those who believe that the world is not the work of God, and is not directed by a Being, simple, spiritual, and distinct from all bodies, must at least confess that there are some things which are endowed with intelligence and will, and which are jealous of their power; which exercise authority over others, which command them to do some things, chastise them, use them harshly, and revenge themselves severely. Is not the earth full of such things? Does not every man know it by experience? It would be a thing altogether unreasonable, to fancy that all beings of that nature are only upon earth, which is but one point if compared to the world. Must reason, wit, ambition, hatred, and cruelty, be upon earth rather than any where else? why so? Can any reason, good or bad, be given for it? I do not think so. Our eyes induce us to believe that those vast spaces we call heaven, which have such powerful and rapid motions, may as well form men as our earth, and deserve no less than the globe we inhabit, to be divided into several dominions. We do not know what passes there, but if we consult only reason, it will appear very probable, or at least possible, that there are thinking beings in those vast spaces, which extend their empire as well as their light to our globe. Our not seeing them is not a proof that we are unknown or indifferent to them: perhaps we are part of their dominions; they make laws which they reveal to us

by the dictates of our conscience, and are very angry with those that transgress them. The possibility of it is sufficient to make Atheists uneasy, and nothing but denying the immortality of the soul can make them fearless; for thereby they would escape the vengeance of those spirits, which otherwise might be more dreadful than God himself. I thus explain myself. There are some men who believe a God, a paradise, and a hell; but they create illusions to themselves, and imagine that the infinite goodness of the most perfect Being, does not permit him to torment his own work for ever. He is the father of all men, say they, and therefore he chastises like a father those who disobey him; and after he has made them sensible of their faults, he restores them to his favour in heaven: Origen argued in that manner. Others suppose that God will annihilate the rebellious creatures, and will be appeased and moved to compassion with a “Quem das finem Rex Magne laborum Virgil. Æneid. lib. i, ver. 245. ¹²⁷... What end of labour has your will decreed?” They carry their illusion so far as to think that the everlasting torments mentioned in the Scripture are only comminatory. If such men were ignorant of the being of a God, and by considering what passes in our world, should believe that there are beings in other worlds, which concern themselves with mankind, they could not be easy when they come to die, unless they believed that the soul is mortal; for if they believed it to be immortal, they might be afraid of falling under the power of a cruel master, angry with them by reason of their actions; it would be to no purpose to hope to come off after having been tormented for some years. A limited being may be destitute of all manner of moral perfection; it may be like our Phalarises and Neros, a sort of men who could have left an enemy in a dungeon for ever, had they been able to get an eternal authority. Will they hope that mischievous beings will not be everlasting? But how many Atheists pretend that the sun had no beginning, and will have no end? This is what I meant when I said that some beings might appear more dreadful than God himself. A man may flatter himself, when he considers that God is infinitely good, and infinitely perfect, and he may fear every thing from an imperfect being: he does not know whether its anger will not last for ever. Every body knows the choice of the prophet David: having to chuse either to be overcome by his enemies, or to be afflicted with a plague sent from God, he answered the prophet Gad, “I am in a great strait: let us fall now into the hand of the Lord, (for his mercies are great) and let me not fall into the hand of man. 2 Sam. xxiv. 14.”

To apply what has been said to a Spinozist, let us remember that he is obliged by his principle to acknowledge the immortality of the soul; for he looks upon himself as the modification of a being essentially thinking. Let us remember that he cannot deny that some modifications are angry with others, put them to the torture, make their torments last as long as ever they can, send them to the gallies for life, and would make that punishment last for ever, if the death of one party or the other did not prevent it. Tiberius, Caligula, and many others are examples of such modifications. Let us remember that a Spinozist makes himself ridiculous if he do not acknowledge that the universe is full of ambitious, morose, jealous, and cruel modifications; for, since the earth is full of them, there is no reason to believe that the air and the heavens are not likewise full of them. Lastly, let us remember, that the essence of human modifications consists not in being clothed with a bulk of flesh. Socrates was Socrates, the day of his conception, or soon after. Spinoza, who made microscopes, should have believed that man is organized

and animated in the seed, and that therefore Socrates was Socrates before his mother conceived him. Whatever he had at that time may remain entire, when a mortal disease has put an end to the circulation of the blood, and the motion of the heart, in the matter wherewith it was enlarged; and therefore he is after his death the same modification as he was during his life, if we consider only what is essential to his person; death cannot therefore free him from the justice or caprice of his invisible persecutors. They may follow him wherever he goes, and torment him whatever visible form he may assume.

These considerations might be made use of to induce to the practice of virtue, even those who adhere to the doctrine of such sects; for it stands to reason that they should be chiefly afraid for having transgressed the laws revealed to their conscience. It is more likely that those invisible beings would concern themselves with the punishment of such faults.

His friends say, “that out of modesty he desired that no sect should go by his name.” I shall set down the words of the Preface of his “Opera Posthuma,” without curtailing them. “The two initial letters only of the author’s name were put to the book, because a little before his death he expressly desired that his name should not be prefixed to his Ethics, which he had ordered to be printed. And why he did so, it seems no other reason can be given, than because he would not have the doctrine called by his name. For he says in the twenty-fifth chapter of the Appendix to the fourth part of his Ethics, that ' those who would help others to the attainment of the supreme good, together with themselves, will not desire that their doctrine be called by their name;' and where he is explaining what ambition is, he plainly taxes such as do this with being ambitious of glory.”

Of all atheistical systems, none is less capable of deceiving than that of Spinoza; for, as I have said

before, it is contrary to the most distinct notions of our minds. Objections throng in upon him, and he can make no answers but what are more obscure than the assertions he should maintain, and therefore bis poison brings a remedy along with it. He would have been more formidable, had he used all his skill to clear an hypothesis, that is very much in vogue among the Chinese, and very different from that which I have mentioned in the second remark of this article. A father of the church owned a thing which, perhaps, would not be excused at this day in a philosopher, viz. that those who deny the Deity or a Providence, allege probable reasons both for their cause, and against their adversaries. “Some deny that there are any gods; others say they doubt whether there are any; others that there are gods, but that they take no care of human affairs: and others affirm it, and say that they are concerned in human affairs, and administrate them. Since, therefore, these things are so, and one of all these opinions must necessarily be true, yet each of them contradicts the other with arguments, and does not want something probable to advance in its favour, and in refutation of the contrary opinions.” If he were in the right, perhaps it were chiefly with respect to those who suppose a great number of souls in the universe, distinct one from another, each of which exists by itself, and acts by an inward and essential principle. They are more powerful one than another, &c. Herein consists the Atheism so generally spread among the Chinese. The author of the following passage tells us how he fancies they have by degrees obscured the true notions.

'' God, that most pure and perfect Being, is become at most the material soul of the whole world, or of its finest part, which is heaven. His providence and his power became limited, though of a much greater extent than the power and

prudence of men. The Chinese doctrine hath always ascribed spirits to the four parts of the world, to the stars, mountains, rivers, plants, towns, and their ditches, houses, and their hearths, in a word, to every thing. They do not say that all spirits are good: they acknowledge wicked ones, which they take to be the immediate cause of the evils and miseries incident to human life. And therefore, as the soul of man was, in their opinion, the cause of all the vital actions of man, in like manner they ascribed a soul to the sun, to be the spring of its qualities and motion. And because, according to this principle, the souls that are dispersed every where, produced in all bodies the actions which appeared natural to those bodies, this was sufficient in their opinion to explain the whole economy of nature, and to supply the omnipotence and infinite providence which they admitted in no spirit, no not in that of heaven. It is true, that because it seems that man, using natural things for his nourishment and conveniency, has some power over natural things; the ancient opinion of the Chinese, which ascribed in proportion a like power to all souls, supposed that the soul of heaven could act upon nature with a prudence, and a power incomparably greater than the prudence and power of men. But at the same time they acknowledged in the soul of every thing an inward power, independent by its own nature of the power of heaven, and acting sometimes against the designs of heaven. Heaven governed nature as a potent king, whom the other souls were to obey, and they were generally forced to it; but some of them did sometimes exempt themselves from it.”

I confess, it is an absurd thing to suppose several eternal beings, independent one of another, and of an unequal power; nevertheless, this supposition appeared true to Democritus, Epicurus, and several other great philosophers. They admitted an infinite quantity of small bodies of different figure, uncreated, self moving, &c. This opinion is still very

common in the East. Those who admit the eternity of matter are not more reasonable than if they admitted the eternity of an infinite number of atoms; for if there can be two beings co-eternal and independent as to their existence, there may be a hundred thousand millions, and so in infinitum. Nay, they ought to say that the number of them is actually infinite, for matter, though never so small, contains distinct parts. And it is to be observed that all the ancients were ignorant of the creation of matter, for they never departed from the axiom, “ex nihilo nihil fit.” And therefore they were not sensible that it is an absurd thing to acknowledge an infinity of substances coeternal, and independent one of another as to existence. However absurd that hypothesis may be, it is not liable to the frightful inconveniences of Spinozism. It would account for many phenomena, by assigning to every thing an active principle, a more powerful one to some, and a less powerful to others; or if their power were equal, it might be said that those which prevail have a greater combination. I do not know whether any Socinian ever said or believed, that the souls of men, not being made out of nothing, exist, and act of themselves. Their liberty of indifference would manifestly flow from it I might add a very large supplement to these objections, did I not perceive that they are already too long, considering the nature of my work. This is not a proper place to engage in a formal dispute; it is sufficient for my design to make some general observations in order to undermine the foundations of Spinozism, and to shew that it is a system grounded upon such a strange supposition, that it overthrows most of the common notions, which are the rule of philosophical discussions. Whoever shews that this system is contrary to the most evident and the most universal axioms we have had hitherto, certainly goes the right way to confute it, though perhaps it is not so proper to reclaim the old Spinozists, as if it were proved to them that the propositions of Spinoza are contrary to one another. They would be more sensible of their prejudices were they forced to confess that he does not always agree with himself, that his proofs are wrong, that he does not prove what wants to be proved, that his conclusions are not just, &c. This method of confuting him, by shewing the absolute defects of his work, and the relative defects of its parts compared one with another, has been well managed by some of those who wrote against him. I have been informed that the author of a small Dutch book, printed within these few days, makes use of it with great force and ability. The author lays down as a fact: I. That the whole system of Spinoza is grounded on this proposition: “That there is but one only substance, and that it is absolutely infinite.” II. That from such a principle Spinoza drew this consequence: “That particular beings are only modifications of that absolutely infinite substance.” The author maintains that this principle, being contested by every body, should have been proved with all imaginable care, and yet that Spinoza gives no proof of it.

The Supplement I intend to give consists in an explanation of the objection which I have already grounded upon God’s immutability. I must confirm it, since some persons maintain that the weakness of it sufficiently appears, if it be considered that no alteration happens to the god of Spinoza, as being a substance infinite, necessary, &c. Though the face of the whole world should change at every moment, though the earth should be reduced to dust, the sun darkened, and the sea become aluminous body, there will only be a change of modifications; the one only substance will always remain a substance infinite, extended, thinking, and so will all substantial or essential attributes. When they say this, they say nothing but what I have already confuted before hand; but

the better to shew their mistake, I must observe here that they dispute against me, as if I had maintained that, accord to Spinoza, the Deity successively annihilates and produces again. This is not what I object, when I say do, the he makes God subject to change and divests him of his immutability. I do not confound, as they do, the notion of things, and the signification of words, by changing the same thing which all reasoning men have ever meant by that word: I do not mean the annihilation and total destruction of a thing, but its passing through several states, the subject of the accidents it ceases to have, and of those it begins to acquire remaining the same. The learned and the illiterate, the mythologists and the philosophers, the poets and the naturalists, are agreed in this notion, and the signification of this word. The fabulous Metamorphoses, so much sung by Ovid, and the true generations explained by philosophers, equally supposed the preservation of the substance, and kept it immutably as the successive subject of the old and new form. These notions have been only confounded by the unhappy disputes of Christian divines; and yet it must be confessed that the most ignorant missionaries come into the right way again when the question is no longer about the Eucharist. If you ask them, upon any other subject, what is meant by the change, conversion, transelementation, and transubstantiation of one thing into another, they will answer you, “the meaning of it is, for instance, that wood becomes fire, that bread becomes blood, and blood flesh, and so on,” They do not think then of the improper expressions consecrated to the controversy of the Eucharist, that the bread is converted and transubstantiated into the body of our Saviour. This way of speaking by no means agrees with the doctrine designed to be explained by it: it is as if one should say that the air of a cask is transformed, changed, converted, and transubstantiated into the wine poured into the cask. The air goes somewhere else, and the wine succeeds it in the same place; one of them is not in the least metamorphosed into the other. Neither is the mystery of the Eucharist, as it is explained by the Roman Catholics, any metamorphosis; the bread is annihilated, as to its substance; the body of Christ takes the place of the bread, and is not the subject of inherence of the accidents of that which are preserved without their substance. But I repeat it again, this is the only case wherein the missionaries make a wrong use of the words change, conversion, or transelementation of one being into another. In all other things they suppose with the rest of mankind, I. That it is essential to a transformation, that the subject of the forms that are destroyed should subsist under the new forms. II. That though the subject be preserved, as to what is essential in it, yet it undergoes an internal change, properly so called, and inconsistent with an immutable Being.

Let the Spinozists, therefore, no longer imagine that they will be allowed to coin a new language, contrary to the ideas of all mankind. If they have any sincerity left, they must confess that, according to their system, God is subject to all the vicissitudes and all the revolutions to which the materia prima of Aristotle is liable, in the system of the Peripatetics. But could any thing be more absurd than to maintain that, supposing Aristotle’s doctrine, matter is a substance which never undergoes any change?

But in order to embarrass the Spinozists, it is but desiring them to give a definition of change. They must define it in such manner, that either it will not differ from the total destruction of a subject, or that it will agree with that one only substance, which they call God. If they define it in the first manner, they will make themselves more ridiculous still than the transubstantiators; and if they define it in the second manner, they will give up the cause.

I add, that the reason they allege to elude my objections proves too much; for if it were a good one, they must needs teach that there never was nor will be any change in the world, and that all manner of change is impossible, whether great or small. Let us prove this consequence. The reason, say they, why God is immutable is, because, as a substance, and an extension, he neither is nor can be subject to any change. He is an extended substance under the form of fire, as well as under the form of wood, which is converted into fire, and so with other things. I will prove to them by this very reason, that the modifications themselves are immutable. Man is, according to their system, a modification of God; they own that man is subject to change, since he is sometimes merry and sometimes melancholy; sometimes he wills one thing, and sometimes he wills it not. This is no change, will I say; for he is as much a man when merry as when melancholy: the essential attributes of man remain immutably in him, whether he be willing to sell his house, or to keep it. Let us suppose the most inconstant man in the world, and such as might fitly apply to himself these verses of Horace:

Mea - - - pugnat sententia secum.
Quod petiit, spernit: repetit, quod nuper omisit.
Æstuat, et vitæ disconvenit ordine toto.
Diruit, ædificat, mutat quadrata rotundis.

HORAT. Epist. I, lib. i, ver. 97.

My mind is with itself at strife,
And disagrees in all the course of life;
And what it hated now, it now desires—
What now it throws away, it now admires:
Unsettled as the sea, or fleeting air,
It razes, builds, and changes round to square.

Creech.

Let us suppose, in fact, a man, who has sincerely professed all religions in less than two years; let us suppose that he is gone through all the conditions of

human life; that he has been successively a merchant, a soldier, and a monk, and then a married man; that he divorced his wife, and then turned registrar, financier, and clergyman, &c. If the Spinozists tell him you have been very inconstant: “Why?” he will say; “You are mistaken; I have never changed; I have been as constantly a man ever since I was born, as a mountain has been a mountain.” What could they reply to that argument ad hominem? Is it not most evident that the whole essence of the human species remains in the man, whether he will the same things, whether he hate to day what he loved yesterday, and daily change his inclinations?

But to make use of an example very proper for a country, the inhabitants whereof are used to the sea, let us suppose that a Spinozist, at his return from Batavia, should say that his voyage has been longer than usually, because the winds changed almost every day. He might be answered. “You are mistaken; the winds never change. Indeed, it may be said that they blow sometimes from the north, sometimes from the south, &c., but they always retain the essence of wind, and therefore they do not change as they are winds, and remain as immutable as your one only substance of the world, for you say it is immutable, because it never changes its state as to its essential properties. No more does the wind change its state as it is wind: it always retains the whole nature and essence of it, and therefore it is as immutable as your deity.”

I go farther, and I say, that even when a man is burnt alive, no alteration happens to him. He was a modification of the divine nature when alive, and is he not so in the flames, or under the form of ashes? Could he lose the attributes that constitute a modification? Could he go through any change as he is a modification? If he changed in that respect, must it not be said that flame is not a mode of extension?

Could Spinoza affirm it without contradicting himself, and destroying his own system? This is sufficient to shew, that they are mistaken, who pretend I have not proved that this system makes God subject to change. My argument cannot be denied, without asserting that modifications themselves are immutable, and that no alterations happen in man's thoughts, nor in the disposition of matter, which is a most absurd thing, and contrary to the doctrines which the Spinozists are forced to acknowledge, for they dare not deny that the modifications of the infinite substance are subject to corruption and generation.

Let us desire of them to grant us, for a moment, by a date non concesso, as the logicians speak, that Socrates is a substance. They must then acknowledge, that each particular thought of Socrates is a modality of his substance. But is it not true, that Socrates, passing from affirming to denying, changes his thought, and that it is a real internal change, and properly so called? And yet Socrates remains still a substance, and an individuum of the human species, whether he affirm or deny, whether he will or reject a thing. And therefore, though he does not change as he is a man, he cannot be said to be immutable; and it may very well be said that he is mutable, and actually changes, because his modifications are not always the same. But let us grant to the Spinozists in our turn, by a dato non concesso, that Socrates is but a modification of the divine substance: let us grant, I say, that his relation to that substance is, as in the common opinion, the relation of Socrates’s thoughts to the substance of Socrates. Since, therefore, the change of those thoughts is a good reason to maintain that Socrates is not an immutable being, but rather an inconstant and mutable substance which very much varies, it ought to be

concluded that the substance of God actually undergoes a change and a variation, properly so called, Whenever one of Socrates’s modifications changes his state. It is therefore a most evident truth, that for a being actually and really to pass from one state into another, it is sufficient that it changes, as to its modifications; and if any thing further be required, to wit, that it should lose its essential attributes, annihilation, or a total destruction, would be grossly confounded with change or alteration.

I am told that several persons pretend that I have not at all understood Spinoza’s doctrine. I have it from several hands; but no body could tell me the reasons of those who make such a judgment of my dispute. And therefore, I can neither precisely confute diem, nor examine if I ought to yield to their reasons, for I know them not. All that I can do, is to justify myself in a general manner, and I think I may say, that if I have not understood the proposition I undertook to confute, it is not my fault. I would not be so positive, if I had written a book against the whole system of Spinoza, examining it paragraph by paragraph. Doubtless, I should not have always understood him, and it is not likely he himself understood every part of his doctrine, and could make all the consequences of his hypothesis intelligible. But since I have confined myself to a single proposition, expressed in few words, which appear clear and precise, and are the foundation of the whole structure, I must have understood it, or it contains some ambiguities altogether unbecoming the founder of a system. However, I need not be uneasy upon this account, both because the sense I put upon that proposition of Spinoza is the same his other adversaries have put upon it, and because the best answer his followers can make is, that he has not been understood. Notwithstanding this charge, the last author who wrote against him

understands the proposition in question as I do; which shews that their accusation is looked upon as very ill grounded.

But to be more particular, what I suppose in my objections amounts to this: I say that Spinoza taught,

1, that there is but one only substance in the universe;

2, that this substance is God; 3, that all particular beings, material extension, the sun, the moon, plants, beasts and men, their motions, ideas, imaginations, and desires, are modifications of God. Now I ask the Spinozists whether their master taught those things or not? If he taught them, it cannot be said that I have been guilty of the Ignoratio Elenchi, or of mistaking the state of the question; for my objections suppose that this is his very doctrine, and attack it upon that Supposition. I am therefore safe, and whoever says that I have undertaken to confute what I did not apprehend, is mistaken. If it be said that Spinoza does not teach the three things above-mentioned, I ask why he expressed himself just as those would, do, who should be extremely desirous to make the reader believe that they teach those three things? Is it a fair and laudable thing to use the common style, without annexing to the words the same ideas other men annexed to them, and without informing the reader of the new sense put upon them? But in order to discuss the matter, let us enquire wherein the mistake may lie. I cannot have been mistaken as to the word substance, for I have not confuted Spinoza upon that head; I have admitted what he supposes, that a thing cannot be a substance, unless it be independent of all causes, or have an eternal and necessary self-existence. I do not think I was mistaken in saying that, according to Spinoza, God only has the nature of a substance; and therefore I believe that, if there were any mistake in my objections, it would be only in putting a different sense upon the words modalities, modifications, modes, from that of Spinoza. But I repeat it again, if I were

mistaken in it, it would be his fault: I understand those words as they have been always understood, or, at least as they are understood by all the new philosophers; and I had reason to believe he took them in that sense, because he gave no public notice that he used them in any other signification. It is the general doctrine of philosophers, that the idea of being, contains two species under it, viz. substance and accident, and that a substance exists by itself, “ens per se subsistens,” and that an accident subsists in another being, “ens in alio.” They add, that subsisting by one’s self signifies only not depending upon a subject of inhesion; and because, according to their notions, this agrees with matter, angels, and human souls; they admit two sorts of substance, one of which is uncreated, and the other created; and they subdivide the created substance into two species. One of those two species is matter; the other our souls. As for accidents, they all believed before the wretched disputes which have divided Christianity, that they do so essentially depend upon their subject of inhesion that they cannot subsist without it. This was their specific character, and by this they were distinguished from substance. The doctrine of transubstantiation destroyed that notion, and forced the philosophers to say, that an accident may subsist without a subject. They could not avoid saying so, since they believed on the one hand that, after the consecration, the substance of the bread in the Eucharist subsisted no longer, and they saw, on the other hand, that all the accidents of the bread subsisted as before. Wherefore they admitted a real distinction between a substance and its accidents, and a mutual separability between those two sorts of beings, by virtue of which each of them could subsist without the other. But some of them maintained still that there were some accidents, whose distinction from their subject is not real, and which cannot subsist without it. They called those accidents modes. Descartes, Gassendus, and in general all those who have, forsaken the scholastic philosophy, deny that an accident can be separated, from its subject, so as to subsist after its separation, and they give to all accidents the nature of those that were called modes, and use the terms of mode, modality, or modification, rather than that of accident: now since Spinoza was a great Cartesian, it is reasonable to think that he put the same sense upon those words as Descartes did. If it be so, he understands by the modification of a substance only a manner of being, which has the same relation to the substance, as figure, motion, rest, and situation have to matter; and pain, affirmation, love, &c. to the soul of man: for this is what the Cartesians call modes: they acknowledge no other modes; whence it appears that they have kept the old notion of Aristotle, according to which an accident is of such a nature, that it makes no part of its subject, and cannot exist without it, and the subject can lose it without losing its existence. Aristot. de Prædicam. cap. ii. ¹²⁸ All this agrees with roundness, motion, and rest with respect to a stone, and likewise with pain and affirmation with respect to the soul. If Spinoza annexed the same idea to what he calls modification of substance, my objections are certainly just; I have attacked him directly, according to the true signification of his words, I have rightly understood his doo trine, and confuted it according to its true sense. In a word, there is no ground for the accusation I examine. But if he had the same notion of matter or extension, and of human souls as Descartes had, and yet would not give the name of substance to extension, or to our souls, because he believed that a substance is a being that depended upon no cause; I confess I have not rightly attacked him, but have ascribed to him an opinion which was none of his. This was what remains to be examined.

Having once laid down that a substance is what exists by itself, as independently upon any efficient cause, as upon any material one, or any subject of inhesion, he ought not to have said that matter and human souls are substances: and because, according to the common doctrine, he divided being only into two species, viz. into substance and modification of substance; he should have said that matter and human souls are only modifications of substance. No orthodox man will deny that, according to this definition of substance, there is but one substance in the world, and that this substance is God. Then the only thing that will remain to be known is, whether he subdivides the modification of substance into two species. If he use such a subdivision, and if he mean by one of those two species what the Cartesians and other Christian philosophers call created substance, and by the other species what they call accident or mode, there will be only a dispute about words between him and them, and it will be a very easy thing to make his whole system orthodox, and put an end to his sect: for a man is a Spinozist only because he believes that Spinoza has utterly destroyed the system of the Christian philosophers, and the existence of an immaterial God, who governs all things with a perfect liberty. Whence we may conclude, by the by, that the Spinozists and their adversaries perfectly agree about the sense of the word modification of substance. Both the one and the other believed that Spinoza meant by it a being of the same nature with what the Cartesians call modes, and that he never understood by that word a being which had the properties or the nature of what we call created substance.

Those, who by all means would maintain that I am mistaken, might suppose that Spinoza rejected only

the name of substance given to beings that depend upon another cause, as to their production, preservation, and operation, in fieri, in esse, et operari, as they say in the schools. They might assert that though he retained all the reality of the thing, he avoided the word because he believed a being so dependent upon its cause, could not be called ens per se subsistens, subsisting by itself, which is the definition of substance. I answer as I have done above, that if it be so, there is only a dispute about words between him and other philosophers, and that I shall willingly confess my mistake, if it appear that Spinoza was indeed a Cartesian, but only that he has been more nice than Descartes in the application of the word substance, and that all the impiety laid to his charge, lies only in a misunderstanding. He only meant (will they add) what is to be found in the books of divines, viz. that the immensity of God fills up heaven and earth, and all imaginary spaces in infinitum, and consequently that his essence penetrates and locally surrounds all other beings; so that it is in him we have life and motion, and that he has produced nothing out of himself, for since he fills up all spaces, he could not place any thing but in himself, there being nothing out pf him. Besides, it is well known that no being can exist without him; and therefore it is true that the properties of the Cartesian modes agree with what is called created substances. Those substances are in God, and cannot exist out of him and without him. It is therefore no wonder if Spinoza called them modifications; but on the other hand he did not deny that there was a real distinction between them, and that each of them constituted a particular principle of actions or passions, in such a manner that one of them does what the other does not; and that when one denies of one of them what is affirmed of the other, it is according to the rules of logic; and nobody can object to Spinoza that it follows from his principles that two contradictory propositions are true of one and the same subject, at the same time.

All this signifies nothing, and in order to come directly to the point, a plain answer should be given to this precise question: does the true and proper character of modification, agree to matter with respect to God, or does it not agree to it? Before you answer it, let me explain by some examples what the proper character of modification is. It is to be in a subject in the same manner as motion is in matter, and thought in the soul of a man, and the form of a porrenger in the vessel called a porrenger. A thing cannot be a modification of the divine substance, only because it subsists in the immensity of God, because it is penetrated by, and surrounded with it on all sides, because it exists by the power of God, and cannot exist without him, nor out of him; it is farther requisite that the divine substance should be its subject of inherence, just as, according to the common opinion, the human soul is the subject of inherence of sense and desire; pewter is the subject of inherence of the form of a porrenger; and matter is the subject of inherence of motion, rest, and figure. Answer now, and if you say that according to Spinoza, the substance of God is not in such a manner the subject of inherence of that extension, of that motion, and of those human thoughts; I will confess that you make an orthodox philosopher of him, that there was no ground to raise so many objections against him, and that he is only to blame for taking great pains to perplex a doctrine which every body knew, and to forge a new system built only upon the ambiguity of a word. If you say that he believed that the substance of God is the subject of inherency of matter, and of all the varieties of extension and of thought, in the same sense as Descartes says that extension is the subject of inherency of motion, and the soul of man

the subject of inherency of sensations and passions, you grant all that I desire: it is in this sense I understood Spinoza, and all my objections are grounded upon it.

The result of what has been said, is a question of fact concerning the true sense of the word modification in the system of Spinoza. Must it be taken for the same thing that is commonly, called created substance, or must it be taken in the sense it has in the. system of Descartes? I believe the last sense is the right, for in the other sense Spinoza would have acknowledged some creatures distinct from the divine substance, and made either of nothing, or of a matter distinct from God. But it were an easy thing to prove by a great many passages of his books, that he admits neither of those two things. Extension, according to him, is an attribute of God; whence it follows that God is essentially, eternally, and necessarily an extended substance, and that extension belongs to him as much as existence; the result of which is, that the particular varieties of extension which make the sun, the earth, trees, the bodies of brutes, the bodies of men, &c. are in God, as the school philosophers suppose they are in the materia prima, or first matter. But if those philosophers supposed that the first matter is a simple and one only substance, they would conclude that the sun and the earth are really the same substance; and therefore Spinoza must needs draw the same conclusion. If he does not say that the sun is composed of God’s extension, he must acknowledge that the extension of the sun was made out of nothing; but he denies creation, and therefore he must say that the substance of God is the material cause of the sun, is what composes the sun, subjectum ex quo, and consequently that the sun is not distinct from God; but God himself, God entirely, since according to his notion, God is not a Being composed of parts.

Let us suppose for a moment that a mass of gold has the power to convert itself into plates, dishes, candlesticks, porrengers, &c. it will not be distinct from those plates and dishes; and if it be farther supposed that this mass is simple and not made up of parts, it must certainly be entire in each plate and in each candlestick; for if it were not entire in each of them, it would have divided itself into several pieces, and therefore it would be composed of parts, which is contrary to the supposition. These reciprocal and convertible propositions would then be true; the candlestick is the mass of gold, the mass of gold is the candlestick; the candlestick is the whole mass of gold, the whole mass of gold is the candlestick. This is an image of the God of Spinoza: he has the power to convert or to modify himself into an earth, a moon, a sea, a tree, &c. and he is absolutely one, and without any composition of parts; and therefore it may be affirmed that the earth is God, that the moon is God; that the earth is God entire, that the moon is so too; that God is the earth, that God is the moon; that God entire is the earth, that God entire is the moon.

There can be but three ways, according to which, ' the modifications of Spinoza are in God, but none of those ways is what the other philosophers say of the created substance. It is in God, say they, as in its efficient and transitive cause; and consequently it is really and wholly distinct from God. But according to Spinoza, the creatures are in God either as an effect in its material cause, or as an accident in its subject of inhesion, or as the form of a candlestick in the pewter it is made of. The sun, the moon, the trees, as they are things that have three dimensions, are in God as in the material cause of which their extension is composed, and therefore there is an identity between God and the sun, &c. The same trees, as they have a form whereby they are distinguished from

a stone, are in God, as the form of a candlestick is in pewter; to be a candlestick is only a manner of being of the pewter. The motion of bodies and the thoughts of men are in God, as the accidents of the peripatetics are in the created substance; they are entities inherent in their subject which are not composed of it, and which make no part of it.

I am not ignorant that an apologist of Spinoza maintains that this philosopher does not ascribe a material extension to God, but only an intelligible one; but if the extension of the bodies we see and imagine, is not the extension of God, whence comes it? How has it been made? If it has been produced out of nothing, Spinoza is orthodox, his new system signifies nothing. If it has been produced out of the intelligible extension of God, it is still a true creation; for the intelligible extension being but an idea, and not having really the three dimensions, cannot form the matter of the extension, which formally exists out of the understanding. Besides, if we distinguish two sorts of extension, one intelligible belonging to God, the other imaginable belonging to matter, we must also admit two subjects of those extensions distinct one from another; and then the unity of substance will be destroyed, and the whole structure of Spinoza falls to the ground. We may therefore say that his apologist does not resolve the difficulty, and raises greater ones.

The Spinozists may take advantage of the doctrine of transubstantiation, for if they consult the writings of the Spanish schoolmen, they will find many subtleties to answer something to the arguments of those who say, that one and the same man cannot be a Mahometan in Turkey and a Christian at Rome, sick at Rome, and well at Vienna; but perhaps they will at last find themselves obliged to compare their system with the mystery of the Trinity, to clear themselves from the contradictions that are objected to them. If

they do not say that the modifications of the divine substance, Plato, Aristotle, a horse, an ape, a tree, a stone, are as many personalities, which though identified with the same substance, may be each of them a particular, determined, and distinct principle of the other modifications, they will never be able to answer the objection grounded upon their overthrowing this principle; two contradictory terms cannot belong to the same subject at the same time. Perhaps they will say some time or other, that as the three persons of the Trinity without being distinct from the divine substance, as divines teach, and without having any absolute attribute that is not the same in number in each of them, have nevertheless each of them some

properties that may be denied of others; so Spinoza may have admitted in the divine substance an infinite number of modalities or personalities, one

of which does a thing which others do not. This will not be a true contradiction, since divines acknowledge a virtual distinction, in ordine ad suscipienda duo praedicata contradictoria, with respect to the susceptibility of two terms that contradict one another. But as the subtle Arriaga judiciously observes upon metaphysical degrees, which some will have to be susceptible of two contradictory propositions, should we transfer to natural things what revelation teaches us concerning the nature of God, it would entirely destroy philosophy, for it would make way to prove that there is no real distinction between the creatures. How little are we beholden to Spinoza! He deprives us of the most necessary principle; for were it true that one and the same thing may be at the same time, what it is and what it is not, all our meditations and reasonings would be insignificant.

I conclude by observing, that the part of Spinoza’s system which I attack, is that which the Spinozists are less willing to defend. I have confuted Spinoza’s

supposition, that extension is not a compounded being,

but one numerical substance, and I have pitched upon that part of his system, because I knew the Spinozists say the difficulties do not lie in that; they think they are much more perplexed when they are asked how thought and extension can be united in one and the same substance. There is something odd in it; for if it be certain that thought and extension have no affinity one with another, it is still more evident that extension consists of parts really distinct one from another; and yet they are more sensible of the first difficulty than of the second, and call the latter a trifle if compared with the other. I thought therefore it was necessary to give them occasion to argue thus: if that part of our system can hardly be defended, which we took to be proof against all attacks, how shall we defend the weak parts of it?

I have been told that the doctrine of Spinoza even considered without a relation to religion, appears very contemptible to the greatest mathematicians of our days, which may be easily believed if these two things be considered: first, that no man ought to be more fully persuaded of the multiplicity of substances, than those who apply themselves to the consideration of extension; secondly, that most of those gentlemen admit a vacuum. But there is nothing more contrary to Spinoza’s hypothesis, than to assert that all bodies do not touch one another; and there never were two systems more opposite than his and that of the atom ists. He agrees with Epicurus in rejecting providence, but in all other things, their systems are like fire and water.—Art. Spinoza.