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fettered by any subscription to articles of faith, has sought, without
reference to Revelation, to solve the great problems relating to God,
Man, and the Universe, on purely natural principles; and, after many
fruitless efforts, has taken refuge, at last, in the Faith of Pantheism
and the Philosophy of the Absolute. The prolific germs of this method of
the interpretation of Nature are also to be found in the writings of
Spinoza.

The circumstance, indeed, which, more than any other, seems to have
commended his system to some of the most inquisitive minds in Europe, is
_its apparent completeness_. It is not a mere theory of Pantheism, nor a
mere method of Exegesis, nor a mere code of Ethics, nor a mere scheme of
Politics, although all these are comprehended under it; but it is a
system founded on a few radical principles, which are exhibited in the
shape of axioms and definitions, and unfolded, by rigorous logical
deduction, in a series of propositions, with occasional scholia and
corollaries, after the method of Geometry; a system which undertakes to
explain the rationale of _every_ part of human knowledge, to interpret
alike the Book of Nature and the Book of Revelation, to determine the
character of prophetic inspiration, and to account for apparent miracles
on natural principles, to establish the real foundations of moral duty,
and the ultimate grounds of state policy; and all this on the strength
of a few simple definitions, and a series of necessary deductions from
them. It is important to mark this characteristic feature of his system;
for while we have directly nothing to do with by far the larger part of
his speculations, which relate to questions foreign to our present
inquiry, yet the fact that his ethical and political conclusions are
deduced from the same principles on which his Pantheistic theory is
founded, serves at once to account for the extensive influence which his
writings have exerted on every department of modern speculation, and
also to show that, in opposing that system, we are entitled to found on
the conclusions which he has himself deduced from it, for the purpose of
disproving the fundamental principles on which it rests. For if, on the
one hand, the principles which he assumes in his definitions and axioms
do necessarily involve the conclusions which are propounded in his
Ethics and Politics; and if, on the other hand, these conclusions are
found to be at variance with the highest views of