His chief work—published after his death, because he could not venture to publish it himself—he entitles _Ethics_. The [pg 117] title is confusing, because the nature-philosophy in it is developed almost as completely as the ethics. It is only when the reader has shaken himself free of all naïve conceptions in his thought about the universe that he can be permitted, according to Spinoza, to begin upon ethics. The fact that ethics too are broken up into precepts which are given as proved is very prejudicial to their exposition. In his attempt to found ethics upon nature-philosophy, Spinoza proceeds as follows. Everything that exists, he says, is given in that infinite Being, which may be called either God or Nature. For us, and to us, it presents itself in two forms: as thought (spirit) and as corporeity (matter). Within this divine nature everything, human activity included, is determined by necessity. There is no such thing as doing, there are only happenings. The meaning of human life, therefore, cannot consist in action, but only in coming to an ever clearer understanding of man’s relation to the universe. Man becomes happy when besides belonging to the universe naturally, he also surrenders himself to it consciously and willingly, and loses himself spiritually within it. Spinoza demands therefore a higher experience of life. With the Stoics and the thinkers of India and China, he belongs to the great family of the monistic and pantheistic nature-philosophers. Like them, he conceives of God merely as the sum-total of nature, and accepts as valid only the notion of God which makes him in this way an independent unity. The attempts, made in the interests of the ethical world-view, to allow God to be at the same time an ethical personality standing outside the universe, are to him an offence against thought. Their only object is, of course, to obtain with the help of a confessed or unconfessed dualism a starting-point for an optimistic-ethical world-view. They are striving to reach along naïve-religious by-roads the goal for which the rationalistic optimistic-ethical interpretation of the universe is making along the direct, but not less naïve, main-road. [pg 118] The tragic result of monistic thinking in the Stoic, the Indian, and the Chinese philosophies is that nature-philosophy, when consistent, arrives only at resignation, not at ethics. Has Spinoza escaped this fate?