Spinoza was one of the last of the mystics and the first of the modern philosophers. He shared with the mystics of an earlier time a consuming sense of the futility of life save as life perfected itself in contemplations of an eternal excellency and communion with something far greater than itself. "After experience had taught me," he says (and this is quoted from Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy"), "that all the usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness." Now there is in all this a strangely modern note--dissatisfaction with what is offered by the commonplace and the accepted, a great emphasis upon the mind as the key to the readjustments of life, a quest for some single formula which would offer "continuous, supreme and unending happiness." This is exactly what Mary Baker Eddy and all the other perplexed and bodily broken "seekers" who gathered about Quimby were really wanting and this is what, for one reason or another, the proffered religious experiences of their time failed to secure them. "This was, then," to quote Royce, "the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim's Progress." (As indeed it is the beginning of every Pilgrim's Progress.) "But now, for what distinguishes him from other mystics and makes him a philosopher and not a mere exhorter, he has his religious passion, he must reflect upon it ... the philosopher must justify his faith." We have no need here to follow Spinoza along all the way, difficult and misty enough, by which he sought to justify his faith. The outstanding fact is enough. He is a mystic who reasons his way through where the elder mystic has felt his way through, and the goal which he finally reaches, though it be the goal which the earlier mystics had found by other roads,--the loss of self in God--is none the less such an achievement of reason as Spinoza was able to compass. _Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of Mind_