Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate. The account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza's labours; his 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus' was the forerunner of German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the application of principles laid down in that remarkable work. But this is not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, we have cared to enter. We have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most associated with the name of its author. It is this which has been really powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine themselves most opposed to it. It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and Schleiermacher. Passing into practical life it has formed the strong, shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with the theories of the most extreme materialism.
It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good), at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired Wordsworth's poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the lessons of nature; the sense of that 'something' interfused in the material world--
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;-- A motion and a spirit, which impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere denial that it is this. We go on to ask what it _is_, and we are obliged to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made, we are really and truly studying a revelation of himself.
It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral side, that the stumbling-block is lying; in that excuse for evil and for evil men which the necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in what fair-sounding words we will. So plain this is, that common-sense people, and especially English people, cannot bring themselves even to consider the question without impatience, and turn disdainfully and angrily from a theory which confuses their instincts of right and wrong. Although, however, error on this side is infinitely less mischievous than on the other, no vehement error can exist in this world with impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life are our best philosophers if we will only listen honestly to what they say to us; and dislike the lesson as we may, it is cowardice which refuses to hear it.