A jest, as you see, but one not
less comic--that is to say, not less tragic--than that of Nietzsche,
that of the laughing lion. And why does the lion laugh? I think he
laughs with rage, because he can never succeed in finding consolation in
the thought that he has been the same lion before and is destined to be
the same lion again.
But if Spinoza and Nietzsche were indeed both rationalists, each after
his own manner, they were not spiritual eunuchs; they had heart,
feeling, and, above all, hunger, a mad hunger for eternity, for
immortality. The physical eunuch does not feel the need of reproducing
himself carnally, in the body, and neither does the spiritual eunuch
feel the hunger for self-perpetuation.
Certain it is that there are some who assert that reason suffices them,
and they counsel us to desist from seeking to penetrate into the
impenetrable. But of those who say that they have no need of any faith
in an eternal personal life to furnish them with incentives to living
and motives for action, I know not well how to think. A man blind from
birth may also assure us that he feels no great longing to enjoy the
world of sight nor suffers any great anguish from not having enjoyed it,
and we must needs believe him, for what is wholly unknown cannot be the
object of desire--_nihil volitum quin praecognitum_, there can be no
volition save of things already known.
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