One grave element, indeed, of a religious faith would seem in such a system to be necessarily wanting.  Where individual action is resolved into the modified activity of the Universal Being, all absorbing and all evolving, the individuality of the personal man would at best appear but an evanescent and unreal shadow.  Such individuality, however, as we now possess, whatever it be, might continue to exist in a future state as really as it exists in the present, and those to whom it belongs might be anxious naturally for its persistence.  And yet it would seem that if the soul be nothing except the idea of a body actually existing, when that body is decomposed into its elements, the soul corresponding to it must accompany it into an answering dissolution.  And this, indeed, Spinoza in one sense actually affirms, when he denies to the mind any power of retaining consciousness of what has befallen it in life, “nisi durante corpore.”  But Spinozism is a philosophy full of surprises; and our calculations of what must belong to it are perpetually baffled.  The imagination, the memory, the senses, whatever belongs to inadequate perception, perish necessarily and eternally; and the man who has been the slave of his inclinations, who has no knowledge of God, and no active possession of himself, having in life possessed no personality, loses in death the appearance of it with the dissolution of the body.

Nevertheless, there is in God an idea expressing the essence of the mind, united to the mind as the mind is united to the body, and thus there is in the soul something of an everlasting nature which cannot utterly perish.  And here Spinoza, as he often does in many of his most solemn conclusions, deserts for a moment the thread of his demonstrations, and appeals to the consciousness.  In spite of our non-recollection of what passed before our birth, in spite of all difficulties from the dissolution of the body, “Nihilo minus,” he says, “sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse.  Nam mens non minus res illas sentit quas intelligendo concipit, quam quas in memoria habet.  Mentis enim oculi quibus res videt observatque sunt ipsae demonstrationes.”

This perception, immediately revealed to the mind, falls into easy harmony with the rest of the system.  As the mind is not a faculty, but an act or acts,—­not a power of perception, but the perception itself,—­in its high union with the highest object (to use the metaphysical language which Coleridge has made popular and perhaps partially intelligible), the object and the subject become one; a difficult expression, but the meaning of which (as it bears on our present subject) may be something of this kind:—­If knowledge be followed as it ought to be followed, and all objects of knowledge be regarded in their relations to the One Absolute Being, the knowledge of particular outward things, of nature, or life, or history, becomes in fact, knowledge of God; and the more complete or adequate such knowledge, the more the mind is raised above