17 



The Goal 

 of Evolution 



The passion for unity that led Giordano Bruno to defy 

 the authority of his day must have made a deep impression 

 upon Spinoza when, at the beginning of his studies, he en- 

 countered Bruno's concept of the universahty of substance— 

 a universality in which every particle of the universe is com- 

 posed inseparably of the physical and the psychical. It was 

 an idea of fundamental unity: all reality one in substance, 

 one in cause, one in origin, one in God. Spinoza carried this 

 idea of unity to the perfection of a complete intellectual sys- 

 tem in which the configurations of the universe in all phases, 

 including man, become recognizable as parts of the whole. 

 He thought that the greatest good is the knowledge that the 

 whole of nature and the mind of man are united; that the 

 more the mind knows, the greater it understands itself and 

 the order of nature; and the more the mind understands the 

 order of nature, the more easily will it be able to lay down 

 rules for itself and to liberate itself from senseless and use- 

 less things. 



Spinoza's aim was a science and ethics in which man 

 would receive the therapy of truth from the discovery of 

 the natural order of the universe and the realization of a 

 properly ordered life in a complete unity of nature and 

 mind. Pursuit of knowledge was for him the road to free- 

 dom and the only permanent happiness. Spinoza did not see 



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