d, not in themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent;
what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals; and as
soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to man a power of free
volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing will cease to exist.

If I am asked (concludes Spinoza) why then all mankind were not
created by God, so as to be governed solely by reason? it was
because, I reply, there was to God no lack of matter to create all
things from the highest to the lowest grade of perfection; or, to
speak more properly, because the laws of God's nature were ample
enough to suffice for the production of all things which can be
conceived by an Infinite Intelligence.

It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn
away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful,
perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in
language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must
claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for
himself. His system must be judged as a whole; and whatever we may think
ourselves would be the moral effect of such doctrines if they were
generally received, in his hands and in his heart they are worked into
maxims of the purest and loftiest morality. And at least we are bound
to remember that some account of this great mystery of evil there must
be; and although familiarity with commonly-received explanations may
disguise from us the difficulties with which they too, as well as that
of Spinoza, are embarrassed, such difficulties none the less exist. The
fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of
all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational,
setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections,
with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with
William de Blyenburg. It will be seen at once with how little justice
the denial of evil as a positive thing can be called equivalent to
denying it relatively to man, or to confusing the moral distinctions
between virtue and vice.

We speak (writes Spinoza, in answer to Blyenburg, who had urged
something of the kind), we speak of this or that man having done a
wrong thing, when we compare him with a general standard of
humanity; but inasmuch as God neither perceives things in such
abstract manner, nor forms t