THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

ii6 THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
world had written on those great questions of God and human destiny.
He took up the study of Latin with a Dutch scholar, Van den Ende, and
moved into a wider sphere of experience and knowledge. His new teacher
was something of a heretic himself, a critic of creeds and governments, an
adventurous fellow who stepped out of his library to join a conspiracy
against the king of France, and adorned a scaffold in 1674. He had a
pretty daughter who became the successful rival of Latin for the affections
of Spinoza; even a modern collegian might be persuaded to study
Latin by such inducements. But the young lady was not so much of an
intellectual as to be blind to the main chance; and when another suitor
came, bearing costly presents, she lost interest in Spinoza. No doubt it
was at that moment that our hero became a philosopher.
At any rate he had conquered Latin; and through Latin he entered
into the heritage of ancient and medieval European thought. He seems
to have studied Socrates and Plato and Aristotle; but he preferred to them
the great atomists, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius; and the Stoics
left their mark upon him ineffaceably. He read the Scholastic philoso-
phers, and took from them not only their terminology, but their geometrical
method of exposition by axiom, definition, proposition, proof,
scholium and corollary. He studied Bruno (1548-1600), that magnificent
rebel whose fires "not all the snows of the Caucasus could quench," who
wandered from country to country and from creed to creed, and evermore
"came out by the same door wherein he went/' searching and
wondering; and who at last was sentenced by the Inquisition to be killed
"as mercifully as possible, and without the shedding of blood" i. e., to
be burned alive. What a wealth of ideas there was in this romantic
Italian! First of all the master idea of unity: all reality is one in substance,
one in cause, one in origin; and God and this reality are one. Again, to
Bruno, mind and matter are one; every particle of reality is composed
inseparably of the physical and the psychical. The object of philosophy,
therefore, is to perceive unity in diversity, mind in matter, and matter
in mind; to find the synthesis in which opposites and contradictions meet
and merge; to rise to that highest knowledge of universal unity which is
the intellectual equivalent of the love of God. Every one of these ideas
became part of the intimate structure of Spinoza's thought.
Finally and above all, he was influenced by Descartes (1596-1650),
father of the subjective and idealistic (as was Bacon of the objective and
realistic) tradition in modern philosophy. To his French followers and
English enemies the central notion in Descartes was the primacy of
consciousness his apparently obvious proposition that the mind knows
itself more immediately and directly than it can ever know anything else;
that it knows the "external world" only through that world's impress
upon the mind in sensation and perception; that all philosophy must in
consequence (though it should doubt everything else) begin
with the