so, in your relations with God, you have, according to Spinoza, to forsake the naive and joyous trust in life through which you first see him. “When,” says Spinoza, “I had learned that all the surroundings of life are vain and futile,” — so his pilgrimage began. A long training, he tells us, was needed ere he became at home in those solitudes where he ultimately found God. It was, he declares, through a contempt for all the things which the multitude seek that he came to learn the true good, beyond all that they seek, namely, the peace which the world can neither give nor take away. Encouraging to us about Spinoza was, then, that his tale ended joyously, in a wisdom whereby he was exalted beyond all the phantom world of sense; but grave and stern about him was his teaching that the way to this wisdom is so toilsome; “for all things excellent,” he says, “are as difficult as they are rare.”
This lesson, that the true joy of the spirit is indeed res severa, a stern thing, is still further deepened in our minds by the struggle of thought in the eighteenth century. It was not the mere waywardness of the eighteenth-century thinkers that forbade them to accept as final the guidance of even the intuitive reason to which Spinoza and his fellows had all trusted so implicitly. It was a necessary progress in reflection that drove these men to their scrutiny of the inner life, a scrutiny whose tragedy we found exemplified by Hume’s lightly and cheerfully spoken, but weighty and gloomy words, “sophistry and illusion.” But this, at all events, still seems to me sure: Whoever has not wandered that Via Dolorosa of the eighteenth century’s doubt of both reason and sense alike, will never be able to knock at the door at the end of that way, the door which Kant first of all men found opened to him. It has opened before us now in the last discussion. We have entered, and what do we find? We find, not what, in the childlike simplicity of our first love
