what is perishable in the phenomena to the idea or law which lies beyond them.  It learns to dwell exclusively upon the eternal, not upon the temporary; and being thus occupied with the everlasting laws, and its activity subsisting in its perfect union with them, it contracts in itself the character of the objects which possess it.  Thus we are emancipated from the conditions of duration; we are liable even to death only quatenus patimur, as we are passive things and not active intelligences; and the more we possess such knowledge and are possessed by it, the more entirely the passive is superseded by the active—­so that at last the human soul may “become of such a nature that the portion of it which will perish with the body in in comparison with that of it which shall endure, shall be insignificant and nullius momenti.” (Eth v. 38.)

Such are the principal features of a philosophy, the influence of which upon Europe, direct and indirect, it is not easy to over-estimate.  The account of it is far from being an account of the whole of Spinoza’s labours; his “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus” was the forerunner of German historical criticism; the whole of which has been but the application of principles laid down in that remarkable work.  But this was not a subject on which, upon the present occasion, it was desirable to enter, and we have designedly confined ourselves to the system which is most associated with the name of its author.  It is this which has been really powerful, which has stolen over the minds even of thinkers who imagine themselves most opposed to it.  It has appeared in the absolute Pantheism of Schelling and Hegel, in the Pantheistic Christianity of Herder and Schleiermacher.  Passing into practical life it has formed the strong shrewd judgment of Goethe, while again it has been able to unite with the theories of the most extreme materialism.

It lies too, perhaps (and here its influence has been unmixedly good) at the bottom of that more reverent contemplation of nature which has caused the success of our modern landscape painting, which inspired Wordsworth’s poetry, and which, if ever physical science is to become an instrument of intellectual education, must first be infused into the lessons of nature; the sense of that “something” interfused in the material world—­

“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;—­
A motion and a spirit, which impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

If we shrink from regarding the extended universe, with Spinoza, as an actual manifestation of Almighty God, we are unable to rest in the mere denial that it is this.  We go on to ask what it is, and we are obliged to conclude thus much at least of it, that every smallest being was once a thought in his mind; and in the study of what he has made we are really and truly studying a revelation of himself.