In his _Ethics_, again, a noble intuition finds voice where he says: “Even if we did not know our Mind,” our individual soul, “to be eternal, we should still put Piety and Religion and, in a word, all those virtues that are to be referred to magnanimity and generosity, first in our esteem.” But he is doubtless excessive in his picturing of the downright, systematic immorality of attitude of ordinary men--the “slaves” and “mercenaries.” “Unless this hope of laying aside the burdens of Piety and Religion after death and of receiving the price of their service, and this fear of being punished by dire punishments after death were in men, and if they, contrariwise, believed that their minds would perish with their bodies: they would let themselves go to their natural inclination and would decide to rule all their actions according to their lust.” And he is doubtlessly, though nobly, excessive in his contrary ideal: “He who loves God cannot strive that God shall love him in return,”--an ideal which is, however, certainly in part determined by his philosophy, which knows no ultimate abiding personality or consciousness either in God or man. Yet, once again, we have him at his inspiring best when, Catherine-like, he tells us: “The supreme Good of those who pursue virtue is common to them all, and all are equally able to rejoice in it”; and “this love towards God is incapable of being stained by the passions of envy and bitterness, but is increased in proportion as we figure to ourselves a larger number of men joined to God by the same bonds of love”; when he declares: “we do not enjoy beatitude because we master our passions; rather, contrariwise, do we master our passions because we enjoy beatitude”; and when he insists, with no doubt too indiscriminating, too Jacopone-like, a simplification, upon what, in its substance, is a profound truth: “the intellectual,” the pure “love of the soul for God is the very love of God, wherewith God loves Himself.”[180] (2) It was, however, the astonishingly circumspect and many-sided Leibniz who, indefinitely smaller soul though he was, succeeded, perhaps better than any other modern philosopher, in successfully combining the divers constitutive elements of the act and state of Pure Love, when he wrote in 1714: “Since true Pure Love consists in a state of soul which makes me find pleasure in the perfections and the felicity of the object loved by me, this love cannot but give us the greatest pleasure of which we are capable, when God is that object. And, though this love be disinterested, it already constitutes, even thus simply by itself, our greatest-good and deepest interest.”