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GENERAL SURVEY. 17
of God, therefore it becomes an argument for his actual
being: according to Spinoza, God is himself contained
in the world. Thus what, with Descartes, was only
reason of knowledge, becomes, with Spinoza, reason of
fact. If the former, in his Ontological Proof, taught
that the existentia of God is a consequence of the essentia
of God, the latter turns this into causa sui, and boldly
opens his Ethics with : per causam sui intelligo id, cujus
essentia (conception) involvit existentiam, remaining deaf
to Aristotle s warning cry, TO c) elvat OVK ov<ria ovfovi \
Now, this is the most palpable confusion of reason and
cause. And if Neo-Spinozans (Schellingites, Hegelians,
&c.), with whom words are wont to pass for thoughts,
often indulge in pompous, solemn admiration for this
causa sui, for my own part I see nothing but a contra-
dictio in adjecto in this same causa sui, a before that is
after, an audacious command to us, to sever arbitrarily the
eternal causal chain something, in short, very like the
proceeding of that Austrian, who finding himself unable
to reach high enough to fasten the clasp on his tightlystrapped
shako, got upon a chair. The right emblem for
causa sui is Baron Miinchhausen, sinking on horseback
into the water, clinging by the legs to his horse and pull
ing both himself and the animal out by his own pigtail,
with the motto underneath : Causa sui.
Let us finally cast a look at the 16th proposition of the
1st book of the Ethics. Here we find Spinoza concluding
from the proposition, ex data cujuscunque rei definitione
plures proprietates intellectus concludit, quce revera ex eadem
necessario sequuntur, that ex necessitate divince natural (i.e.,
taken as a reality), infinita infinitis modis sequi debent :
this God therefore unquestionably stands in the same
relation to the world as a conception to its definition. The
corollary, Deum omnium rerum esse CAUSAM EFFICIENTEM,
is nevertheless immediately connected with it. It is im-
c