Were we to lay aside our Spinoza at this point, we should be inclined to agree with the judgment of most of his contemporaries and of his successors for more than a century, that although the name of God is constantly on his lips his thought makes the name an empty one, that he is at bottom an atheist. Furthermore we should fail to see how he could have called his great work an “ethics,” inasmuch as it is hardly to be understood how in a world where every act of the body is necessitated by eternal laws of physics, every thought of the mind by equally rigid laws of psychology, there could be such a thing as a good or bad act, a good or bad thought. Where there is no freedom, how can there be right and wrong, worth and unworthiness? And yet we shall find that into this hard inhospitable world-picture, Spinoza has set a theory of life that not only recognizes and defines the difference between the good and the bad, but culminates in a phrase whose religious feeling is unmistakable: Virtue is knowledge; the only knowledge is to know God; to know God is to love him. If one grasp this part of his philosophy, one will understand how it came about that him whom the eighteenth century called atheist, the nineteenth remembered as a _Gottrunkener Mensch_--a God-intoxicated man. It would be too much to attempt to follow the technical expression that Spinoza gives to his thought. Every word is heavy with the burden of long centuries of scholasticism. But I think it is not impossible to put oneself in possession of one principal idea on which the rest follows, not without jolt, yet with a fair degree of ease. Let us then put the problem clearly before us. Suppose Nature, including the incident of human life, were one great machine without purpose in the whole, without freedom in the detail, how would it be possible to regard any part of nature, a given man for example, as either good or bad? If this man lives as he must, what use, nay what meaning in advising him how he _ought_ to live?