It is at this point that the social philosophy of Spinoza, like that of Socrates, betrays its weaker side. How is intelligence to be spread? Perhaps it is too much to ask the philosopher this question; he may feel that he has done enough if he has made clear what it is which will most help us to achieve our ends. Spinoza, after all, was not the kind of man who could be expected to enter into practical problems; his soul was filled with the vision of the eternal laws and had no room for the passing expediencies of action. His devotional geometry was a typical Jewish performance; there is something in the emotional make-up of the Jew which makes him slide very easily into the attitude of worship, as contrasted with the Græco-Roman emphasis on intellect and control. All pantheism tends to quietism; to see things _sub specie eternitatis_ may very well pass from the attitude of the scientist to the attitude of the mystic who has no interest in temporal affairs. It is the task of philosophy to study the eternal and universal not for its own sake but for its worth in directing us through the maze of temporal particulars; the philosopher must be like the mariner who guides himself through space and time by gazing at the everlasting stars. It is wholesome that the history of philosophy should begin with Thales; so that all who come to the history of philosophy may learn, at the door of their subject, that though stars are beautiful, wells are deep. X The Legacy of Spinoza But to leave the matter thus would be to lose a part of the truth in the glare of one’s brilliance. We have to recognize that though Spinoza stopped short (or rather was cut short) at merely a statement of the prime need of all democracies,--intelligence,--he was nevertheless the inspiration of men who carried his beginning more nearly to a practical issue. To Spinoza, through Voltaire and the English deists, one may trace not a few of the thought-currents which carried away the foundations of ecclesiastical power, civil and intellectual, in eighteenth-century France, and left the middle class conscience-free to engineer a revolution. It was from Spinoza chiefly that Rousseau derived his ideas of popular sovereignty, of the general will, of the right of revolution, of the legitimacy of the force that makes men free, and of the ideal state as that in which all the citizens form an assembly with final power.[120] The French Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence go back in part to the forgotten treatises of the quiet philosopher of Amsterdam. To have initiated or accelerated such currents of thought--theoretical in their origin but extremely practical in their issue--is thereby once for all to have put one’s self above the reach of mere fault-finding. One wonders again, as so many have wondered, what would have been the extent of this man’s achievement had he not died at the age of forty-four. When Spinoza’s pious landlady