The Remaining Works of Benedictus de Spinoza

either abhors or at least abstains from them, they will nevertheless not be able to fail to love deeply the soul that felt it could be fed "by love toward an eternal and infinite thing alone," and which, "by assiduous meditation, arrived at the point where it saw that by omitting the desire for riches, lust, and honors, it would be omitting nothing but certain evils; but in the very investigation of the true good, even if it might perhaps not attain it, a certain good" would nevertheless be obtained. Inflamed at last by this zeal, it set before its meditations, seriously and as much as possible continuously, the "cognition of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature." A divine intention, indeed, which could not but make the soul of the seeker a participant in the true good, however much by its investigation of the true (as that is the common lot of mortals!) it may seem not always to have attained the proposed goal equally happily.

Although, to be sure, in Benedictus there are two things above all that I shall never cease to admire and love—first, that ingenuous purity of spirit with which he pursued the true good, superior by internal strength to any superstition, whether of hope or fear, and second, the marvelous simplicity of the system he devised and the unbroken connection in his entire line of thought—yet two things, as far as I can grasp, seem to have been a hindrance, with the result that this architect of a system that is in itself most brilliantly coherent did not guard himself sufficiently against the human tendency toward error when laying his foundations.