Like Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Lie-tse, and the Chinese thinkers as a body, Spinoza champions an optimistic monism without suspecting that under a far-away heaven and in a far-off age, he had such great predecessors._(_41_)_ His resignation is of a world- and life-affirming character. He conceives of infinite Being not as something devoid of qualities, as the Indians do, but as life with a full content. The self-perfecting, therefore, for which man is to strive is not for him, as it is for them, in any way an anticipation of a state of death, but a living out of life which is guided by deep reflexion. An elegantly egoistic world- and life-affirmation speaks through him, as through Chwang-tse. The efforts of the man who refuses to deceive himself about himself are not directed, therefore, to any sort of action which is recognized as serviceable, but are concerned with maintaining his own Being and giving it the fullest possible experience of life. Whatever good he does to others he never does for their sakes, but always for his own. Spinoza rejects the achievement of modern ethics as influenced by Christianity, viz. the regarding of altruism as something that belongs to the essence of ethics, and confines himself to the thought that in the last resort all ethical action aims at our own interests, though it may be at our highest spiritual ones. In order to avoid thinking anything which is not a necessity of thought, he goes back of his own free will into the captivity in which ancient ethics lived. If he could let himself go, he would, like Chwang-tse, conduct a campaign against the morality of love and duty. But since he already has as thoroughgoing opponents the [pg 119] authorities, the theologians, whether Jewish or Christian, and almost every philosopher, he has to speak cautiously and offer mankind without attracting notice the life-view which advocates profound and thinking egoism. Just as God, the totality of universal Being, acts not with any aim or object but from an inner necessity, so also does the man who has attained to insight. He does only what contributes to complete experience of life, nothing else. Virtue is capacity for self-maintenance at the highest level, and this self-maintenance is attained to when reason is the highest motive to action, and efforts after knowledge and freedom from passion take possession of the man and make him free, that is, allow his conduct to be determined by himself alone and on purely inward grounds. The ordinary man is unstable, moved hither and thither in all sorts of ways by outward causes, with no idea of his future fortune or his final fate, like a ship that is tossed about, now here, now there, on a stormy sea. Ethics, therefore, consists in living our life more in the form and fashion given it by thought than in bodily actuality.