THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SPINOZA
no way of avoiding this except by Hmiting office to men of "trained
skill. >13S Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give
the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers. "The fickle disposition
of the multitude almost reduces those who have experience of it to
despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not by reason. 9 ' 139 Thus
democratic government becomes a procession of brief-lived demagogues,
and men of worth are loath to enter lists where they must be judged and
rated by their inferiors. 140 Sooner or later the more capable men rebel
against such a system, though they be in a minority. "Hence I think it is
that democracies change into
aristocracies, and these at length into
monarchies"; 141
people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power
is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and "he who seeks
equality between unequals seeks an absurdity." Democracy has still to
solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all
alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit,, by whom they wish
to be ruled.
Who knows what light the genius of Spinoza might have cast upon this
^
pivotal problem of modern politics had he been spared to complete his
work? But even that which we have of this treatise was but the first
and imperfect draft of his thought While writing the chapter on
democracy he died.
VI. THE INFLUENCE OF SPINOZA
"Spinoza did not seek to found a sect, and he founded none"; 142
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yet all
philosophy after him is permeated with his thought. During the generation
that followed his death, his name was held in abhorrence; even
Hume spoke of his "hideous hypothesis"; "people talked of Spinoza,"
said Lessing, "as if he were a dead dog."
It was Lessing who restored him to repute. The great critic surprised
Jacobi, in their famous conversation in lySo, 143 by saying that he had
been a Spinozist throughout his mature life, and affirming that "there is
no other philosophy than that of Spinoza." His love of Spinoza had
strengthened his friendship with Moses Mendelssohn; and in his great
play, Nathan der Weise, he poured into one mould that conception of
the ideal Jew which had come to him from the living merchant and the
dead philosopher. A few years later Herder's Einige Gesprdche uber
Spinoza's System turned the attention of liberal theologians to the Ethics;
Schleiermacher, leader of this school, wrote of "the holy and excommunicated
Spinoza," while the Catholic poet, Novalis, called him "the
god-intoxicated man."
Meanwhile Jacobi had brought Spinoza to the attention of Goethe; the
"T. T-P., ch. 13. "7M&, ch. 17. Ethics, IV, 58, note.
T. P., ch. 8. ""Pollock, 79. ^Printed in full in Willis.