But this dread of the crowd was only a part of Spinoza’s nature, and not the dominant part. His fear of men was lost in his boundless capacity for affection; he tried so hard to understand men that he could not help but love them. “I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand, human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions ... not as vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.”[84] Even the accidents of time and space were sinless to his view, and all the world found room in the abundance of his heart. “Spinoza deified the All in order to find peace in the face of it,” says Nietzsche:[85] but perhaps, too, because all love is deification. All in all, history shows no man more honest and independent; and the history of philosophy shows no man so sincere, so far above quibbling and dispute and the picking of petty flaws, so eager to receive the truth even when brought by the enemy, so ready to forgive even persecution in the depth and breadth of his tolerance. No man who suffered so much injustice made so few complaints. He became great because he could merge his own suffering in the suffering of all,--a mark of all deep men. “They who have not suffered,” says Ibsen,--and, one might add, suffered with those they saw suffer,--“never create; they only write books.” Spinoza did not write much; the long-suffering are seldom long-winded. A fragment _On the Improvement of the Understanding_; a brief volume on religion and the state; the _Ethics_; and as he began to write the chapter on democracy in the _Political Treatise_ consumption conquered him. Bacteria take no bribes. III Political Ethics