vely affected. We are immortal
only in adequate cognition and in love to God; more of the wise man's soul
is immortal than of the fool's.

[Footnote 1: The conception _amor Dei intellectualis_ in Spinoza is
discussed in a dissertation by C. Luelmann, Jena, 1884.]

Spinoza's ethics is intellectualistic--virtue is based on knowledge.[1] It
is, moreover, naturalistic--morality is a necessary sequence from human
nature; it is a physical product, not a product of freedom; for the acts of
the will are determined by ideas, which in their turn are the effects
of earlier causes. The foundation of virtue is the effort after
self-preservation: How can a man desire to act rightly unless he desires to
be (IV. _prop_. 21, 22)? Since reason never enjoins that which is contrary
to nature, it of necessity requires every man to love himself, to seek
that which is truly useful to him, and to desire all that makes him more
perfect. According to the law of nature all that is useful is allowable.
The useful is that which increases our power, activity, or perfection, or
that which furthers knowledge, for the life of the soul consists in thought
(IV. _prop. 26; app. cap_. 5). That alone is an evil which restrains man
from perfecting the reason and leading a rational life. Virtuous action is
equivalent to following the guidance of the reason in self-preservation
(IV. _prop_. 24).--Nowhere in Spinoza are fallacies more frequent than
in his moral philosophy; nowhere is there a clearer revelation of the
insufficiency of his artificially constructed concepts, which, in their
undeviating abstractness, are at no point congruent with reality. He is
as little true to his purpose to exclude the imperative element, and to
confine himself entirely to the explanation of human actions considered as
facts, as any philosopher who has adopted a similar aim. He relieves the
inconsistency by clothing his injunctions under the ancient ideal of the
free wise man. This, in fact, is not the only thing in Spinoza which
reminds one of the customs of the Greek moralists. He renews the Platonic
idea of a philosophical virtue, and the opinion of Socrates, that right
action will result of itself from true insight. Arguing from himself, from
his own pure and strong desire for knowledge, to mankind in general, he
makes reason the essence of the soul, thought the essence of reason, and
holds the direction of the impulse of self-preservation to the perfection
of knowledge, wh