Do we wish to behold a spectacle of how weak the human mind really is in the midst of all its grandeur, and of the limits which must finally and abruptly check its progress, however high its flight, we will read Plotinus, Spinoza, and Hegel, three martyrs to intellectual ambition, differing very much according to the difference of the eras and the nations to which they respectively belong, but similar in this point at least, that they ignore the visible world, and leave it behind them, to enter that world which dazzles their sight, where they plunge into a void in quest of what they call "Being!" {314} Two passions have impelled, are impelling, and will, probably, still occasionally impel men of eminent powers of mind to Pantheism: the passionate craving for an universal science, and the passionate longing for universal unity--feelings noble both, but illegitimate and incapable of satisfaction. "I have resolved," said Spinoza, "to search if there exist a real Good, a Good capable, singly, of filling the entire soul after it shall have rejected all the rest--in a word, a Good that gives the soul, when the soul finds it and possesses it, the eternal and supreme happiness. ... Man is essentially a being that thinks, and the highest degree of human knowledge ought to be the highest degree of human felicity. ... My sources of enjoyment consist in the exercise of the reason." [Footnote 64] [Footnote 64: Œuvres de Spinoza, French translation of M. Emile Saisset, vol. i, pp. 15, 16.] {315}