A real devotion of oneself to the common weal appears, however, to Spinoza not to be called for. According to him the perfect human society appears of itself just in proportion as its individual members live according to reason. In contrast, therefore, to his contemporary, Hobbes, Spinoza looks for the progress of society not to the [pg 121] measures taken by the authorities, but to a growth towards perfection in the dispositions of their subjects. The State is to educate its citizens not to submissiveness, but to the right use of freedom. In no way must it do any injury to their sincerity, and it must therefore tolerate all religious views. Far as Spinoza goes to meet the spirit of the age, there is one point on which he cannot agree with it, viz. that there are ethical aims and objects, aims and objects practical and purposive, to be realized in the world. Advancing far ahead of his contemporaries, he reaches a universal notion of ethics, and recognizes that from the standpoint of consistent thinking, every ethical relation is nothing but an expression of the relation of the individual to the universe. When, however, ethics have in this way become universal, they are faced by the question how the relation of the individual to the universe is conceivable as producing an effect upon the universe. On the answer to this question it depends whether a real activist ethic can be established, or whether the ethical is only so far present as resignation can be explained as ethical. That is the reef which threatens danger to all nature-philosophy, and whenever a thinker imagines that with clever seamanship and a favourable wind he can sail round it without coming to grief upon it, he is nevertheless finally driven upon it, as by submarine currents, and suffers the same fate as his predecessors. Like Lao-tse and Chwang-tse, like the Indians, the Stoics, and all self-consistent thinkers before him, Spinoza is unable to furnish what ethics demand, viz. that the relation of man to the universe shall be conceived of as not merely a spiritual relation, but as active devotion to it in the world of sense. The opponents of this solitary thinker are instinctively conscious that with the re-establishment of an independent nature-philosophy there appears something which means danger to the optimism and the ethics of their world-view. Hence [pg 122] we find in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries everyone uniting to suppress Spinoza’s philosophy. It is on behalf of optimism that the age is most troubled. The terrible earthquake which in 1755 destroyed Lisbon, sets the mass of men asking whether the world is really ruled by a wise and kindly Creator. Voltaire, Kant, and many other thinkers of the age seize on the occurrence as a topic for discussion, partly confessing their perplexity, partly seeking new ways out of the difficulty for their optimism. Leibniz’s optimistic-ethical world-view side by side with nature-philosophy