THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
miscreants, it will be without hate; we forgive them because they know
not what they do.
Above all, determinism fortifies us to expect and to bear both faces
of fortune with an equal mind; we remember that all things follow by
the eternal decrees of God. Perhaps even it will teach us the "intellectual
love of God," whereby we shall accept the laws of nature gladly, and
find our fulfillment within her limitations. He who sees all things as
determined cannot complain, though he may resist; for he "perceives
things under a certain species of eternity/' 103 and he understands that his
mischances are not chances in the total scheme; that they find some
justification in the eternal sequence and structure of the world. So
minded, he rises from the fitful pleasures of passion to the high serenity
of contemplation which sees all things as parts of an eternal order and
development; he learns to smile in the face of the inevitable, and
"whether he comes into his own now, or in a thousand years, he sits con-
tent." 104 He learns the old lesson that God is no capricious personality
absorbed in the private affairs of his devotees, but the invariable sustain-
ing order of the universe. Plato words the same conception beautifully in
the Republic: "He whose mind is fixed upon true being has no time to
look down upon the little affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and
enmity in the struggle against them; his eye
and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by
one another, but all in order moving according to reason; these he imitates,
and to these he would, as far as he can, conform himself." 105 "That
which is necessary," says Nietzsche, "does not offend me. Amor fati"
love of late "is the core of my nature." 106 Or Keats :
To bear all naked truths,
And to envisage circumstance, all calm:
That is the top of sovereignty. 107
is ever directed towards fixed
Such a philosophy teaches us to say Yea to life, and even to death "a
free man thinks of nothing less than of death ; and his wisdom is a medita-
tion not on death but on life." 108 It calms our fretted egos with its large
perspective; it reconciles us to the limitations within which our purposes
must be circumscribed. It may lead to resignation and an Orientally
supine passivity; but it is also the indispensable basis of all wisdom and all
strength.
4.
RELIGION AND IMMORTALITY
After all, as we perceive, Spinoza's philosophy was an attempt to love
even a world in which he was outcast and alone; again like Job, he typified
his people, and asked how it could be that even the just man, like the
""II, 44, cor. 2. ^Whitman. M5 5QO.
**Ecce Homo, p. 130. It was rather Nietzsche's hope tlian his attainment.
^Hyperion, II, 203. ^Ethics, IV, 67.