THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SPINOZA
i. NATURE AND GOD
Page one plunges us at once into the maelstrom of metaphysics. Our
modern hard-headed (or is it
soft-headed?) abhorrence of metaphysics
captures us, and for a moment we wish we were anywhere except in
Spinoza. But then metaphysics, as William James said, is nothing but an
attempt to think things out clearly to their ultimate significance, to find
their substantial essence in the scheme of reality, or, as Spinoza puts it,
their essential substance; and thereby to unify all truth and reach that
"highest of all generalizations" which, even to the 36
practical Englishman,
constitutes philosophy. Science itself, which so
superciliously scorns meta-
physics, assumes a metaphysic in its every thought. It happens that the
metaphysic which it assumes is the metaphysic of Spinoza.
There are three pivotal terms in Spinoza's system: substance, attribute,
and mode. Attribute we put aside
temporarily, for
simplicity's sake. A
mode is any individual thing or event, any particular form or shape,
which reality transiently assumes; you, your body, your thoughts, your
group, your species, your planet, are modes; all these are forms, modes,
almost literally fashions, of some eternal and invariable
reality lying
behind and beneath them.
What is this
underlying reality? Spinoza calls it substance, as literally
that which stands beneath. Eight generations have fought voluminous
battles over the meaning of this term; we must not be discouraged if we
fail to resolve the matter in a paragraph. One error we should guard
against: substance does not mean the constituent material of anything,
as when we speak of wood as the substance of a chair. We approach
Spinoza's use of the word when we speak of "the substance of his remarks."
If we go back to the Scholastic philosophers from whom Spinoza
took the term, we find that they used it as a translation of the Greek
ousia, which is the present participle of einai, to be, and indicates the
inner being or essence. Substance then is that which is (Spinoza had not
forgotten the impressive "I am who am" of Genesis) ; that which eternally
and unchangeably is, and of which everything else must be a transient
form or mode. If now we compare this division of the world into substance
and modes with its division, in The Improvement of the Intellect, into
the eternal order of laws and invariable relations on the one hand, and
the temporal order of time-begotten and death-destined things on the
other, we are impelled to the conclusion that Spinoza means by substance
here very nearly what he meant by the eternal order there. Let us provisionally
take it as one element in the term substance, then, that it betokens
the very structure of existence, underlying all events and things^
and constituting the essence of the world.
"Spencer, First Principles, Part II, cbu i-
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