Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [238]
Spinoza was unwilling to accept the implications of Descartes’s ideas, especially the separation of mind and matter and the apparent separation of an infinite God from the finite world of matter. God was not simply the creator of the universe; he was the universe. All that is is in God, and nothing can be apart from God. This philosophy of pantheism (or monism) was set out in Spinoza’s book Ethics Demonstrated in the Geometrical Manner, which was not published until after his death.
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Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics (1677)
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To Spinoza, human beings are not “situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom” but are as much a part of God or nature or the universal order as other natural objects. The failure to understand God had led to many misconceptions—for one, that nature exists only for one’s use:
As they find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them not a little in their search for what is useful, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, they come to look on the whole of nature as a means for obtaining such conveniences.22
Furthermore, unable to find any other cause for the existence of these things, they attributed them to a creator-God who must be worshiped to gain their ends: “Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshiping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice.” Then, when nature appeared unfriendly in the form of storms, earthquakes, and diseases, “they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at some wrong done them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship,” rather than realizing “that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike.”23 Likewise, human beings made moral condemnations of others because they failed to understand that human emotions, “passions of hatred, anger, envy and so, considered in themselves, follow from the same necessity and efficacy of nature” and “nothing comes to pass in nature in contravention to her universal laws.” To explain human emotions, like everything else, we need to analyze them as we would the movements of planets: “I shall, therefore, treat of the nature and strength of my emotions according to the same method as I employed heretofore in my investigations concerning God and the mind. I shall consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.”24 Everything has a rational explanation, and humans are capable of finding it. In using reason, people can find true happiness. Their real freedom comes when they understand the order and necessity of nature and achieve detachment from passing interests.
PASCAL Blaise Pascal (BLEZ pass-KAHL) (1623–1662) was a French scientist who sought to keep science and religion united. He had a brief but checkered career. An accomplished scientist and a brilliant mathematician, he excelled at both the practical, by inventing a calculating machine, and the abstract, by devising a theory of chance or probability and doing work on conic sections. After a profound mystical vision on the night of November 23, 1654, which assured him that God cared for the human soul, he devoted the rest of his life to religious matters. He planned to write an “apology for the Christian religion” but died before he could do so. He did leave a set of notes for the larger work, however,