According to its teaching the true happiness and highest activity of men is to be found in what Spinoza terms "the intellectual love of God." The phrase seems to have been used to designate that full and clearer knowledge which is aware that we ourselves and all the conditions of our life are determined by the infinite Nature, by God Himself, who moves in us as well as in all things acting upon us. The initiated no longer regard themselves as single, isolated, impotent beings, but as included in the divine nature. Themselves and all things are seen under the form of eternity. This thought is, according to Spinoza, the fruit of the highest activity of the human mind; this is the _amor intellectualis dei_; and the supreme good for man. His doctrine of immortality is bound up with this intellectual form of religious mysticism--knowledge of God involves participation in His immortality: "Death is the less harmful the more the mind's knowledge is clear and distinct, and the more the mind loves God.... The human mind may be of such a nature that the part of it which we showed to perish with the body may be of no moment to it in respect to what remains." He who is "affected with love towards God" has a mind "of which the greater part is eternal." Thus the soul achieves its emancipation by identifying itself with God--who is the object of its knowledge and love. The path is arduous, and the closing passage of the _Ethics_ admits this: "If the road I have shown is very difficult, it can yet be discovered. And clearly it must be very hard when it is so seldom found.... But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare." SPINOZA AND RELIGION.--It is interesting to note that Spinoza, though a "free-thinking" Jew, adopts towards the fundamental dogma of Christianity an attitude which approximates to the classical expression of it in the Fourth Gospel. He held that "God's eternal wisdom, which reveals itself in all things, and especially in the human mind, has given a special revelation of itself in Christ." Perhaps his ethic, like that of the Stoics, with whom he had so much in common, was better adapted to satisfy the needs of the philosopher than of the ordinary man. But, in the seventeenth century, it was the philosophers and learned men that were in need of a spiritual interpretation of the universe; common men had theirs already, in the traditional pietism which philosophers are often too ready to despise. To Spinoza--and this is one of the many indications of the genuine profundity of his thought--the simple believers seemed already to be in possession of too much of the truth for it to be desirable or profitable for them to indulge in speculation. To the question of his landlady at the Hague as to whether she could be saved by the religion which she professed, his reply was that her religion was good, that she should seek no other, and that she would certainly be saved by it if she led a quiet and pious life.