Take the man Spinoza, that Portuguese Jew exiled in Holland; read his
_Ethic_ as a despairing elegiac poem, which in fact it is, and tell me
if you do not hear, beneath the disemburdened and seemingly serene
propositions _more geometrico_, the lugubrious echo of the prophetic
psalms. It is not the philosophy of resignation but of despair. And when
he wrote that the free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and
that his wisdom consists in meditating not on death but on life--homo
liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat et eius sapientia non
mortis, sed vitae meditatio est (_Ethic_, Part IV., Prop. LXVII.)--when
he wrote that, he felt, as we all feel, that we are slaves, and he did
in fact think about death, and he wrote it in a vain endeavour to free
himself from this thought. Nor in writing Proposition XLII. of Part V.,
that "happiness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself," did he
feel, one may be sure, what he wrote. For this is usually the reason why
men philosophize--in order to convince themselves, even though they fail
in the attempt. And this desire of convincing oneself--that is to say,
this desire of doing violence to one's own human nature--is the real
starting-point of not a few philosophies.
Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which and by which I
live? Whither do I go and whither goes everything that environs me? What
does it all mean? Such are the questions that man asks as soon as he
frees himself from the brutalizing necessity of labouring for his
material sustenance.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86