THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SPINOZA
ing basis, the underlying condition, the substance, of the bridge; without
them it would fall. And like the bridge, the world itself is sustained by its
structure and its laws; it is upheld in the hand of God.
The will of God and the laws of nature
^
being one and the same reality
diversely phrased, 43 it follows that all events are the mechanical operation
of invariable laws, and not the whim of an irresponsible autocrat seated
in the stars. The mechanism which Descartes saw in matter and body
alone, Spinoza sees in God and mind as well. It is a world of determinism,
not of design. Because we act for conscious ends, we suppose that all
processes have such ends in view; and because we are human we suppose
that all events lead up to man and are designed to subserve his needs.
But this is an anthropocentric delusion, like so much of our thinking. 44
The root of the greatest errors in philosophy lies in projecting our human
purposes, criteria and preferences into the objective universe. Hence our
"problem of evil" : we strive to reconcile the ills of life with the goodness
of God, forgetting the lesson taught to Job, that God is beyond our little
good and evil. Good and bad are relative to human and often individual
tastes and ends, and have no validity for a universe in which individuals
are ephemera, and in which the Moving Finger writes even the history of
the race in water.
Whenever, then, anything in nature seems to us ridiculous, absurd or evil,
it is because we have but a partial knowledge of things, and are in the main
ignorant of the order and coherence of nature as a whole, and because we
want everything to be arranged according to the dictates of our own reason;
although in fact, what our reason pronounces bad is not bad as regards the
order and laws of universal nature, but only as regards the laws of our own
nature taken separately. 45 ... As for the terms good and bad, they indicate
nothing positive considered in themselves. . . . For one and the same thing
can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent. For example, music is
good to the melancholy, bad to mourners, and indifferent to the dead. 46
Bad and good are prejudices which the eternal reality cannot recognize;
"it is right that the world should illustrate the full nature of the infinite,
and not merely the particular ideals of man." 47 And as with good and
bad, so with the ugly and the beautiful; these too are subjective and personal
terms, which, flung at the universe, will be returned to the sender
unhonored. "I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either
beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination
can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused." 48
"For example, if motion which the nerves receive by means of the eyes
from objects before us is conducive of health, those objects are called
"T. T-P., ch. 3. "Ethics, Part I, Appendix.
^Tractatus Politicus, ch. a. "'Ethics, IV. pref.
*7
Santayana, Introduction to the Ethics, Everyman ed., p. xx.
^Epistle 15, ed. PollocL
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