Man also is of God. The essence of man is in the mind. Man is a logical being. God alone owns truth; in so far as man thinks truly and clearly, he is a part of the infinite God. Logic is the basis of ethics. Spinoza ignores sentiment, ignores art. Good and evil are but other names for useful and not useful. But that alone is useful that we follow the necessary and universal laws, seeking by the depth and reach of intellect to know and understand. Virtue is the pursuit of knowledge. There are three kinds of knowledge: the blurred perceptions of the senses, the light of the understanding, the intuition of intellect. The last is the highest. Virtue is the sense of being; whatever heightens the joyous consciousness of our active faculties is therefore good. The wise man delights in the moderate enjoyment of pleasant food and drink, in the color and loveliness of green shrubs, in the adornment of garments, in music's sweetness. But our true being is to be found only in intellect; hence, virtue the joy of being, is the joy of thought; hence, the bold assertion--that is moral which helps, and that immoral which hinders thought. Man is a social being. As a drop is raised upward in the great ocean by the onflowing of the wave, so the individual mind is exalted by the presence and communion of congenial minds moving in the same current. 'Tis thus that Spinoza deduces the social virtues. Hate is evil at all times, for hate implies the isolation and the weakness of the powers of reason. We should reward hatred with love and restore the broken accord of intellect. Love is the sense of kinship in the common search for reason's goal--wisdom. That all men should so live and act together that they may form, as it were, one body and one mind, is the ideal of life. Friendship therefore he prizes as the dearest of earth's possessions, and wedlock he esteems holy because in it is cemented the union of two souls for the common search of truth. We should be serene at all times and shun fear, which is weakness, and hope also which is the child of desire, and haughtiness and humbleness and remorse and pity should we avoid. But in stillness and with collected power shall we possess our souls obedient to the laws of mind that make our being and helping when we help for reason's sake. The passions bind us to passing phenomena. When they become transparent to our reason, when we know their causes then our nature conquers outward nature and we are masters, we are free. Thus the emotional life is extinguished. The feelings lose their color and vitality, become blank "as lines and surfaces," and man, freed from the constraints of passion, dwells in the pure realm of intellect, and in constant intercourse with the mind of God, fulfills the purpose of his existence--to know and understand.