The Collected Works of Benedict de Spinoza

whether he abhors or abstains from it, he will nevertheless not be able to avoid loving deeply a soul that felt "it could be nourished solely by love toward an eternal and infinite object," and who "arrived through assiduous meditation at the point of seeing" that by omitting the desire for wealth, lust, and honors, he would be omitting nothing but certain evils; and in the very investigation of the "true good," he foresaw that even if he perhaps would not attain it, he would nonetheless obtain a "certain good." Fired by this study, he seriously and, as much as possible, continuously placed at the forefront of his meditations "the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature." A divine plan, indeed, which could not but make the seeker's soul a participant in the "true good," although through his "investigation of truth" (as it is the common lot of mortals!) he does not always seem to have reached the proposed goal with equal success.

Although there are two things in Benedictus that I will never cease to admire and love—first, that ingenuous purity of soul with which he pursued the true good, superior to any superstition through internal strength, whether by hope or fear; and second, the marvelous simplicity of the system he devised and the unbroken connection in his entire line of thought—there are, however, two things that, as far as I can see, seem to have hindered this architect of a highly coherent system from protecting himself sufficiently from the human tendency toward error when laying his foundations.