But there is more than one sense in which this saying may be taken. We have for example the Baconian thought, “knowledge is power.” That is, given any end to be striven for, other things being equal the one who brings science to bear is the more likely to conquer circumstances, to triumph, to be free. This sense of the power of knowledge is not lacking in Spinoza. But the freedom that comes with knowledge may be of a higher kind than the mere bettering of our chances of success. After all, human skill is extremely limited; defeat is every man’s portion, and one of the most important questions in life is how to bear failure. If knowledge is our best arm to ward off defeat, so is it our best solace when defeat, the inevitable, comes. For do we but understand that the fate that has come upon us was not to be escaped but was imposed by the eternal laws of nature, repining becomes impossible. Pain is a fact, we cannot escape it altogether, we cannot deny it when it has seized us. We _can_ though prevent the sourness and bitterness that the ignorant fall prey to when they suffer. For pain is one thing, hate another. Pain is not to be escaped; hate may be. And the way to kill hate in our hearts is to connect the individual fact that is painful with the whole order of nature which makes this as every other fact necessary. Now the order of nature as we have seen flows from God as the theorems of geometry flow from its axioms. To understand the necessity of any fact is to recognize God as its cause. When we have done this the bitterness of defeat is gone. No man, says Spinoza, can hate God. I have mentioned two senses in which knowledge meant freedom: (1) the sense in which it reduces the chances of failure and pain to a minimum; (2) the sense in which it frees us from the bondage of passion and bitterness, when the unavoidable remainder of pain comes upon us. There is still one deepest sense in which knowledge is freedom. So far, the excellence of knowledge has been made to depend upon its fitness as a means--either to the end of obtaining a maximum of success, or to the end of bearing the still inevitable minimum of defeat. We have now to consider knowledge as an end in itself. Since, as we have seen, the pain of life is the sense of defeat, of limitation; its pleasure the sense of triumph, of freedom, we should expect to find Spinoza urging as the blessed way of life that one, if any such there be, which could meet no defeat; that one whose success did not hang upon circumstances in which a man’s life happened to be cast; that life, in a word, that was at each moment absolute freedom.