THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

140
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
acquired; only so is the idea adequate, the response all that it can be.92
The instincts are magnificent as a driving force, but dangerous as guides;
for by what we may call the individualism of the instincts,
each of them
seeks its own fulfilment, regardless of the good of the whole personality.
What havoc has come to men, for example, from uncontrolled greed,
pugnacity, or lust, till such men have become but the appendages of the
instinct that has mastered them. "The emotions by which we are daily
assailed have reference rather to some part of the body which is affected
beyond the others, and so the emotions as a rule are in excess, and detain
the mind in the contemplation of one object so that it cannot think of
others." 93 But "desire that arises from pleasure
or pain which has refer-
to man as a
ence to one or certain parts of the body has no advantage
whole." 94 To be ourselves we must complete ourselves.
All this is, of course, the old philosophic distinction between reason
to Socrates and the Stoics. He
and passion; but Spinoza adds vitally
knows that as passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is
dead. "An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed except by a
contrary and stronger emotion," 95 Instead of uselessly opposing reason to
passion a contest in which the more deeply rooted and ancestral element
usually wins he opposes reasonless passions to passions coordinated by
reason, put into place by the total perspective of the situation. Thought
should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought. "A passion
ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of
it, and the mind is subject to passions in proportion to the number of
adequate ideas which it has." 96 "All appetites are passions only so far as
they arise from inadequate ideas; they are virtues . . . when generated
by adequate ideas"; 97 all intelligent behavior i. e., all reaction which
meets the total situation is virtuous action; and in the end there is no
virtue but intelligence.
Spinoza's ethics flows from his metaphysics: just as reason there lay in
the perception of law in the chaotic flux of things, so here it lies in the
establishment of law in the chaotic flux of desires; there it lay in seeing,
here it lies in acting, sub specie eternitatis under the form of eternity;
of the whole.
in making perception , and action fit the eternal perspective
Thought helps us to this larger view because it is aided by imagination,
which presents to consciousness those distant effects of present action?
phrase it in later terms: reflex action is a local response to a local stimulus;
instinctive action is a partial response to part of a situation; reason is total response
to the whole situation.
"IV, 44, note. "IV, 60. "IV, 7, 14- "V, 3-
^Notice the resemblance between the last two quotations and the psychoanalytic
doctrine that desires are "complexes" only so long as we are not aware of the precise
causes of these desires, and that the first element in treatment is therefore an
attempt to bring the desire and its causes to consciousness to form "adequate
ideas" of it and them.