The Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

or were to abhor or abstain from them, one still could not help but deeply love a soul which felt that it "could feed itself solely on love for an eternal and infinite thing," and who through "assiduous meditation reached the point where he saw that he" would lose nothing but certain evils by omitting the desire for riches, lust, and honors; yet in the very investigation of the true good, even if he were perhaps not going to attain it, he foresaw that a "certain good" would nevertheless be obtained. Inflamed at last by this desire, he seriously and, as much as possible, continuously prefixed to his meditations the "knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature." It was a divine plan, which could not but make the soul of the seeker a participant in the true good, however much he may seem not to have always attained the proposed goal as happily through his investigation of the true (as is the common lot of mortals!).

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 through internal strength to any superstition whether of hope or fear, and second, the wonderful simplicity of the system which he devised and the unbroken connection in his entire line of thought—nevertheless, as far as I can grasp, two things seem to have hindered this architect of a system so excellently coherent in itself from guarding himself sufficiently against the human inclination to error while laying his foundations.