THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
ical systems, which are unable to explain how becoming arises out of being — one which Spinoza's intellectual kinsmen of the Eleatic school did not touch, as they opposed nothing but deceptive appearance to being. According to Spinoza there can not really be any becoming or true motion, nor any really operative cause; yet he calls God the first cause of the universe, the origin and preserver of all things — but an immanent, not a transcendent cause. Everything in the world is determinate, including man; and even God himself is determined by the necessity of his own being and can not voluntarily do anything or leave it undone. His freedom consists in the fact that he is determined only by himself. And not only is it impossible to predicate understanding and will of God, but he has also no individual existence, since this would constitute a limitation, and every limitation is a negation, which can not apply to God. It follows from the divine infinitude that everything which is, the attributes as well as all their modes, is in God. Thus Spinoza is neither a materialist nor a spiritualist, but both at once; he is not an atheist nor an acosmist (as he has been called), but in the strict sense of the word a pantheist. The task which had been impossible for the Eleatic school, the establishment of a system of ethics, became Spinoza's principal aim. In his greatest work he begins, indeed, with the definition of God, but gives it there because God must be known in order that man may be freed from his passions and able to attain happiness. When man understands that all depends, in an unchangeable order, upon God, that nothing exists for itself but all alike rest in God, he will no longer be disturbed by external happenings or carried away by his passions. The perfection of man lies in his realization of himself and all things in God; and this brings joy with it, joy based on the intellectual love for God which is the mystical cornerstone of Spinoza's system. The doctrine of the modi allowed him to develop an ethical system; particular things, although they have no independent existence, yet, as individualistic elements within his monism, possess a sort of nature of their own by virtue of which men are subject to conditions of passion that must be suppressed before they can find their perfection in God.
The pantheism of Spinoza was bitterly attacked until late in the eighteenth century, and it was long before any one came forward to defend him from
the common accusation of atheism;
5. Kant but in consequence of the controversy
and Fichte. between Jacobi and Mendelssohn as to
the Spinozism of Lessing a reaction took place which resulted in his being highly honored. Herder, and later Voigtlander, even undertook to prove that he was not a pantheist but a theist, although of course without success. Kant's critical system was intended to turn definitely away from pantheism and show no connection with Spinoza. Reason, he asserted, is bound to believe in a God, in a cause of all nature which is itself distinct from nature, satisfying the moral sense and possessing intelligence and will. But there is not a little in his philosophy that lends it a pantheistic coloring. This is particularly noticeable in his
ethics. According to him the practical reason gives the moral laws; this reason is that of men, and of all men, or moral laws could have no universal validity. Man is thus autonomous, the lawgiver in the practical field. Religion comes into existence only when duties, which are the commands of reason, are recognized as commands of God. Then the same laws take their origin alike from our reason and from God; but there can not be two sources of law; therefore reason must also be God. The idealistic systems which followed Kant have been called more or less pantheistic; but they get this quality less from Kant than from Spinoza, like whom they regard the whole content of being as the essence of the absolute or the divine. Spinoza's influence was probably least felt by Fichte, who, however, in his treatise Ueber den Grand unseres Glaubens an eine gottliche W eltregierung (1798) gives utterance to a sort of pantheism when he says that the living moral order is God; that man needs, and can conceive, no other; that the notion of God as a separate substance is impossible and unthinkable. Every individual has a destined place in this worldorder, i.e., in God. In his doctrine of the Ego, connected with Kant's transcendental apperception, the absolute Ego from which what is individual must be deduced is equivalent to the Godhead; and later, as in his Anweisung zum seligen Leben (1806), the absolute is the general point of departure of his speculation. Here God is the alone really Existent, who through his absolute thought places external nature, as an unreal non-Ego, over against himself.
Starting from Fichte's doctrine of the Ego,
Schelling transformed it by combination with
Spinozism into his system of identity. Spinoza's
doctrine of the immobility of substance was thrown
into the background by his conception
6. Schel- of development. Object and subject, ling's real and ideal, nature and spirit are Pantheism, for him identical in something higher, which is neither subject nor object, nor both together, but absolute identity as the principle of true idealism. This original unity passes into the polar opposites of positive or ideal and negative or real being. The negative or real pole is nature, in which resides a vital principle, uniting, by virtue of a general continuity of all natural causes, all organic and inorganic existences in one complete organism. Schelling terms this vital principle the soul of the world. History, like nature, forms a complete whole; and in both it is possible to recognize the gradual revelation of the absolute. Pantheism appears also in Schelling s later views, as set forth in the Philosophische Untersuchungen uber die menschliche Frciheit (1809). Following here the lead of Jacob Boehme, he distinguishes in God three momenta: indifference, the primordial basis or " abyss " of the divine nature; differentiation into cause and existence; and the identity or reconciliation of the differentiated. Unity of the particular will with the universal will is goodness; separation of the two is evil. Man IS the redeemer of nature, through whose mediation God receives nature and makes it divine.
In Hegel the influence of Spinoza is less appar-