Pages from a Journal with Other PapersWhite, William Hale
General
Pages from a Journal with Other Papers
White, William Hale
English essays
We now come to the final propositions of the _Ethic_, those in which
Spinoza declares his belief in the eternity of mind. The twenty-second
and twenty-third propositions of the fifth part are as follows:—
“In God, nevertheless, there necessarily exists an idea which
expresses the essence of this or that human body under the form of
eternity.”
“The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but
something of it remains which is eternal.”
The word “nevertheless” is a reference to the preceding proposition which
denies the continuity of memory or imagination excepting so long as the
body lasts. The demonstration of the twenty-third proposition is not
easy to grasp, but the substance of it is that although the mind is the
idea of the body, that is to say, the mind is body as thought and body is
thought as extension, the mind, or essence of the body, is not completely
destroyed with the body. It exists as an eternal idea, and by an eternal
necessity in God. Here again we must not think of that personality which
is nothing better than a material notion, an image from the concrete
applied to mind, but we must cling fast to thought, to the thoughts which
alone makes us what we _are_, and these, says Spinoza, are in God and are
not to be defined by time. They have always been and always will be.
The enunciation of the thirty-third proposition is, “The intellectual
love of God which arises from the third kind of knowledge is eternal.”
The “third kind of knowledge” is that intuitive science which “advances
from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God
to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things;” {54} “No love except
intellectual love is eternal,” {55a} and the scholium to this proposition
adds, “If we look at the common opinion of men, we shall see that they
are indeed conscious of the eternity of their minds, but they confound it
with duration, and attribute it to imagination or memory, which they
believe remain after death.” The intellectual love of the mind towards
God is the very “love with which He loves Himself, not in so far as He is
infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of
the human mind, considered under the form of eternity; that is to say,
the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite
love with which God loves Himself.” {55b} “Hence it follows that God, in
so far as He loves Himself, loves men, and consequently that the love of
God towards men and the intellectual love of the mind towards God are one
and the same thing.” {55c} The more adequate ideas the mind forms “the
less it suffers from those affects which are evil, and the less it fears
death” because “the greater is that part which remains unharmed, and the
less consequently does it suffer from the affects.” It is possible even
“for the human mind to be of such a nature that that part of it which we
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