643 



SPINOZA, BENEDICT 



SPOHN, FRIEDRICH AUGUST. 



64-1 



bodies, and have perplexed themselves by associating the word God 

 with sensible images, which it is hard to avoid. The existence of God 

 can be conceived ; indeed it is a necessary conception from which no 

 mind can escape ; but the manner of his existence can never be con- 

 ceived. The source of error in this case is that men do not name 

 things correctly ; for they do not err in their own minds, but in this 

 application ; as men who cast up wrong see different numbers in their 

 minds from those in the true result. 



The mind has no free will, but is determined by a cause, which 

 itself is determined by some other cause, and so on for ever. For 

 the mind is only a mode of thinking, and therefore cannot be the free 

 cause of its actions. Will and understanding are one and the same 

 thing ; and volitions are only affirmations or negations, each of which 

 belongs to the essence of the idea affirmed or denied. This subtle 

 opinion is also adopted by Malebranche, Cudworth, and Fichte. 



Spinoza's moral system is as rigidly deduced from premises as his 

 metaphysical. Most men who have written on moral subjects, he 

 says, have treated man as something out of nature, as a kind of 

 ' imperium in imperio,' rather than as a part of the general order. 

 They have conceived him to enjoy a power of disturbing that order 

 by his own determination, and ascribed his weakness and inconstancy 

 not to the necessary laws of the system, but to some strange defect in 

 himself, which they cease not to lament, deride, or execrate. But the 

 acts of mankind, and the passions from which they proceed, are in 

 reality but links in the series, and proceed in harmony with the com- 

 mon laws of universal nature. Men finding many things in themselves 

 and in nature, serving as means to a certain good, which things they 

 know to have not been provided by themselves, have believed that 

 some one has provided them, arguing by analogy of the means which 

 they in other instances employ themselves. Hence they have imagined 

 a variety of gods, and these gods they suppose to consult the good of 

 men in order to be worshipped by them, and have devised every 

 means of superstitious devotion to ensure the favour of these divinities. 

 Finding also in the midst of so many beneficial things in nature not a 

 few of an opposite effect, they have ascribed them to the anger of the 

 gods on account of the neglect of men to worship them. Nor has the 

 experience of calamities falling alike on the pious and impious cured 

 them of this belief; they choose rather to acknowledge their ignorance 

 why good and evil are thus distributed, than give up their favourite 

 theory. But all things occur by eternal necessity. Moreover were 

 God to act for an end, he must desire something which he wants ; for 

 it is acknowledged by theologians that he acts for his own sake and 

 not for the sake of things created. 



Men having thought that all things were created for them, have 

 invented names to distinguish that as good which tends to their 

 benefit ; and believing themselves free, have got the notions of right 

 and wrong, praise and dispraise. And when they can easily apprehend 

 the relations of things, they call them well ordered, if not, ill ordered; 

 as if order were anything except in regard to our imagination of it. 



We are said to act when anything takes place within us, or without 

 us, for which we are an adequate cause ; that is, when it may be 

 explained by means of our own nature alone. We are acted upon 

 when anything takes place within us which cannot wholly be 

 explained by our own nature. Passions are the affections of the body, 

 which increase or diminish its power of action, and they are also the 

 ideas of those affections. Neither the body can determine the mind 

 to thinking, nor can the mind determine the body to rest or motion. 

 For all that takes place in body must be caused by God, considered 

 under his attribute of extension, and all that takes place in mind must 

 be caused by God, considered under his attribute of thought. The 

 mind and the body are but one thing considered under different attri- 

 butes ; the order of action and passion in the body being the same in 

 nature with that of action and passion in the mind. But men, though 

 ignorant how far the natural powers of body reach, ascribe its opera- 

 tions to the determination of the mind, veiling their ignorance in 

 specious words. For if they allege that the body cannot act without 

 the mind, it may be answered that the mind cannot think till impelled 

 by the body, nor are all the volitions of the mind anything else than 

 its appetites, which are modified by the body. 



All things endeavour to continue in their actual being, this endea- 

 vour being nothing else than their essence, which causes them to be 

 until some exterior cause destroys their being. The mind is conscious 

 of its own endeavour to continue as it is, which is, in other words, 

 the appetite that seeks self-preservation ; what the mind is thus 

 conscious of seeking, it judges to be good, and not inversely. Many 

 things increase or diminish the power of action in the body, and all 

 such things have a corresponding effect on the power of thinking in 

 the mind. Thus it undergoes many changes, and passes through 

 different stages of more or less perfect power of thinking. Joy is the 

 name of a passion, in which the mind passes to a greater perfection or 

 power of thinking ; grief, one in which it passes to a less. From these 

 two passions, and from desire, Spinoza deduces all the rest of the 

 passions in a curious but questionable manner. 



Such is the substance of Spinoza's celebrated system; a system 

 which lias excited so much odium as to have become synonymous 

 with atheism. We have pointed out the source of this error ; but we 

 cannot refrain from adding the testimony of the pious Schleiermacher 

 to his religious earnestness. " Offer up with me," he exclaims, " with 



reverence a lock of hair to the manes of the holy but repudiated 

 Spinoza ! The great spirit of the world penetrated him ; the Infinite 

 was his beginning and his end ; the universe his only and eternal love. 

 He was filled with religion and religious feeling ; and therefore is it 

 that he stands alone, unapproachable, the master in his art, but elevated 

 above the profane world, without adherents, and without even citizen- 

 ship." ('Rede iiber die Religion,' p. 47.) Gothe thus speaks: "The 

 mind that wrought so powerfully on mine, and had so great an influ- 

 ence on the whole frame of my opinions, was Spinoza's. After I had 

 looked round the world in vain for means of shaping my strange moral 

 being, I fell at length on the ' Ethics ' of this man. What I read in 

 this work what I thought I read in it I can give no account of ; 

 enough that I found there a calm to my passions ; it seemed to open 

 to me a wide and free view over the sensuous and moral world. But 

 what particularly riveted me was the boundless disinterestedness that 

 beamed forth from every sentence. The all-equalising serenity of 

 Spinoza contrasted with my all-agitating vehemence ; his mathematical 

 precision, with my poetical way of feeling and representing." (' Dich- 

 tung und Wahrheit,' xiv.) 



These testimonies from such unquestionable sources will not be 

 without benefit in directing men to look calmly into Spinoza, and 

 meditate upon him. The student will derive great help from Boulain- 

 villiers's 'Refutation de Spinoza,' Bruxelles, 1731, in which the 

 doctrines are popularised and divested of their mathematical pre- 

 cision, which repels many readers; also from Jacobi's ' Brief wechsel 

 mit Mendelssohn,' Breslau, 1789 ; and from Hallam's ' History of 

 the Literature of Europe,' vol. iv., pp. 243-63. 



SPIX, JOHANN BAPTIST VON, was born at Hochstadt, in the 

 circle of Upper Franconia in Bavaria, on February 9, 1781, and after 

 being educated at Bamberg, was entered at the theological seminary at 

 Wiirzburg to study divinity. After pursuing this course for two 

 years he abandoned divinity for medicine, and in 1806 received the 

 degree of M.D. He had paid particular attention to human and com- 

 parative anatomy, and in 1809 he was sent, at the cost of the Bavarian 

 government, to pursue his investigations in Paris. On his return to 

 Munich he was admitted an associate of the Academy of Sciences, 

 which, after the issue in 1811 of his 'Geschichte und Beurtheilung 

 aller Systeme der Zoologie,' made him conservator of its natural 

 history museum. In 1815 he published his 'Cephalogenesis,' in which 

 he traces the head in its development from that of the insect to that 

 of man, following it through all the various classes and families of 

 animals. In 1817 he was commissioned by the Bavarian government 

 to accompany C. F. P. von Martius in the exploration of Brazil. They 

 landed at Rio Janeiro, traversed the provinces of San Paulo and 

 Minas Geraes, proceeded thence by land to Bahia, and through 

 Piauhy to Maranhao. They then sailed to the province of Para", 

 where Spix ascended the Amazonas to the borders of Peru, while 

 Martius explored the Yapura. On their return they examined several 

 other of the rivers, and reached the town of Parri in June 1820. The 

 health of Spix had greatly suffered from the climate and the labour he 

 had undergone, but he completed in 1824-25, with some help from 

 other zoologists, five illustrated works on the apes, bats, birds, and 

 reptiles of Brazil, which contain much that is new and valuable, but 

 with some hasty views and incorrect conclusions to be attributed to 

 his desire of completing the works before his death, which took place 

 on May 13, 1826. His papers relating to Brazil he bequeathed to 

 Von Martius, and he left a considerable legacy to the Academy of 

 Sciences at Munich. 



SPOFFORTH, REGINALD, a composer in whom were united 

 much originality, and very elegant taste, and a thorough knowledge of 

 his art, was born in 1768, at Southwell in Nottinghamshire, and there 

 received his early musical instructions from his uncle, organist of the 

 collegiate church of that place. Repairing to London, he took lessons 

 on the piano-forte from the celebrated Steibelt, and completed his 

 studies in harmony under Dr. Benjamin Cooke. It was his fate, as 

 unhappily it has been the fate of the English musicians generally, to 

 depend during the greater part of his life almost wholly on his practice 

 as a teacher, and he was in considerable repute as a piano-forte master. 

 As a composer, he is now, and will be hereafter, known only as a glee- 

 writer. Two of his earliest glees gained, in the year 1793, the prize 

 gold medals given by the Catch-Club. This merited success estab- 

 lished his reputation, and encouraged him to produce other works of 

 the same kind, the best of which were published by himself, and most 

 of these have taken their station among the classical musical produc- 

 tions of this country. On the death of his uncle, Mr. Spofforth canio 

 into the possession of considerable property, but did not long enjoy 

 his independence; for his devotion to his profession and his unrelaxing 

 industry brought on a nervous disease, which terminated in paralysis, 

 and in 1826 deprived music of one of its most ingenious votaries, and 

 society of one of its most amiable members. 



SPOHN, FRIEDRICH AUGUST WILHELM, a German philo- 

 logist, was born May 16, 1792, at Dortmund. He was educated at the 

 University of Wittemberg, and afterwards went to Leipzig, where he 

 was, in 1817, made professor extraordinary of philosophy, and in 1819 

 professor in ordinary of ancient literature. He was a scholar of the 

 greatest industry, and died at an early age, January 17, 1824, worn 

 out by the severity of his studies. He illustrated antiquity by a 

 variety of works in the several departments of criticism, philology, 



