But do not
let yourselves be deceived; there is no such eternity of the individual
mind. Everything is _sub aeternitatis specie_--that is to say, pure
illusion. Nothing could be more dreary, nothing more desolating, nothing
more anti-vital than this happiness, this _beatitudo_, of Spinoza, that
consists in the intellectual love of the mind towards God, which is
nothing else but the very love with which God loves Himself (prop,
xxxvi.). Our happiness--that is to say, our liberty--consists in the
constant and eternal love of God towards men. So affirms the corollary
to this thirty-sixth proposition. And all this in order to arrive at the
conclusion, which is the final and crowning proposition of the whole
_Ethic_, that happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.
The everlasting refrain! Or, to put it plainly, we proceed from God and
to God we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language
of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from
nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.
And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice
of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.
And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one
irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict
Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of
happiness? Was he free?
In the corollary to proposition xli.
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