You will learn to love life! But Spinoza has a loftier word for it: You will learn to love God. A clearing up of this expression may well end our account of the religion of Spinoza. You must recall our saying that for Spinoza and his fellow rationalists, all truths were deducible from the single one “God is,” as all theorems of geometry are proved from its axioms. If the truths respecting triangles follow from the nature of a triangle and are not merely the result of physical measurement, so too, the truths about the world follow from the nature of God and are not merely brute facts that we have to accept because we are continually bumping against them. To understand a particular experience is to recognize God as its cause. But we have seen that such understanding is the greatest happiness that can come to man, for it is his assurance of power, of freedom from pain. Now Spinoza defines love as “pleasure accompanied with the idea of an external cause.” If understanding is pleasure, and if it is at the same time recognition of God as a cause, it fulfils the condition of being love, and of course, love of God. It is this love of God that is at once knowledge, freedom, virtue and blessedness. “For blessedness,” our philosopher has written, “blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor do we rejoice in it _because_ we restrain our desires, but on the contrary because we rejoice in it we are able to restrain our desires.” “I know,” he writes, “that the belief of the multitude is different. Most men seem to think that they are free just in so far as they are permitted to gratify desire, and that they give up their independence just in so far as they are obliged to live according to the precept of the divine law. “Piety, then, and religion and all things without restriction that are referred to as greatness of soul, they regard as burdens; and they hope after death to receive the reward of their bondage, that is, of piety and religion. And not by this hope alone, but also and chiefly by fear--the fear of being punished after death with dire torments--are they induced to live according to the precept of the divine law so far as their poverty and feebleness of soul permit. If men had not this hope and fear, but if on the contrary they thought that minds perished with the body, and that for the wretched, worn out with the burden of piety, there was no continuance of existence, they would return to their inclinations, and decide to regulate everything according to their lusts and to be governed by chance rather than by themselves. This seems to me no less absurd than it would if some one because he does not believe he can nourish his body with good food to eternity should choose to stuff himself with what is poisonous and deadly; or because he sees that his mind is not eternal or immortal should choose on that account to be mad and to live without reason.”