And Spinoza closes his doctrine of life with a calm hymn to science. “I have completed all that I intended to show regarding the power of the mind over the emotions, and the freedom of the mind. From what I have said it is evident how much stronger and better the wise man is than the ignorant man, who is held by mere desire. For the ignorant man, besides being agitated in many ways by external causes and never attaining to true satisfaction of the soul, lives as it were without consciousness of himself, of God, and of things, and just as soon as he ceases to be acted upon, ceases to be. While on the contrary the wise man is little disturbed in mind, but conscious by a certain eternal necessity of himself, of God, and of things, he never ceases to be, but is always possessed of true satisfaction of soul. If indeed, the path that I have shown to lead to this appear difficult, yet it may be found, and all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.” III A DISCIPLE OF SPINOZA An Illustration I have somewhere found it recorded that as Johann Gottlieb Fichte progressed with his first reading of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” he was moved to tears. To those who have labored through the tortured pages of the great German thinker this would be no matter for surprise, were it not for the quality of the tears:--not those of vexation and baffled understanding, indeed, but of enthusiasm and sheer gratitude. For Fichte had fallen into the melancholy persuasion of Spinoza. At least, certain views of this austere thinker of the seventeenth century appeared to Fichte as no less gloomy in their implication than irresistible in the logic which led to them. Irresistible were the reasons which had driven Spinoza to look upon nature as governed by inexorable Fate. In the world as a whole there was no purpose, in its parts there was no freedom. Gloomy, then, was the implication few but Spinoza himself could escape, that man in such a machine had lost all the familiar marks of a moral being. It was from the heavy chains of such bondage that Kant seemed to free the poor Spinozist by holding out to him the hope of a deeper-lying freedom, while not denying his apparent subjection to the universal and necessary laws of physical nature. It was by this promise of freedom that Fichte was moved to the enthusiasm, the gratitude, the tears of which I have spoken.