d we return, which, translated into concrete language, the language
of life and feeling, means that my personal consciousness sprang from
nothingness, from my unconsciousness, and to nothingness it will return.

And this most dreary and desolating voice of Spinoza is the very voice
of reason. And the liberty of which he tells us is a terrible liberty.
And against Spinoza and his doctrine of happiness there is only one
irresistible argument, the argument _ad hominem_. Was he happy, Benedict
Spinoza, while, to allay his inner unhappiness, he was discoursing of
happiness? Was he free?

In the corollary to proposition xli. of this same final and most tragic
part of that tremendous tragedy of his _Ethic_, the poor desperate Jew
of Amsterdam discourses of the common persuasion of the vulgar of the
truth of eternal life. Let us hear what he says: "It would appear that
they esteem piety and religion--and, indeed, all that is referred to
fortitude or strength of mind--as burdens which they expect to lay down
after death, when they hope to receive a reward for their servitude, not
for their piety and religion in this life. Nor is it even this hope
alone that leads them; the fear of frightful punishments with which they
are menaced after death also influences them to live--in so far as their
impotence and poverty of spirit permits--in conformity with the
prescription of the Divine law. And were not this hope and this fear
infused into the minds of men--but, on the contrary, did they believe
that the soul perished with the body, and that, beyond the grave, there
was no other life prepared for the wretched who had borne the burden _of
piety_ in this--they would return to their natural inclinations,
preferring to accommodate everything to their own liking, and would
follow fortune rather than reason. But all this appears no less absurd
than it would be to suppose that a man, because he did not believe that
he could nourish his body eternally with wholesome food, would saturate
himself with deadly poisons; or than if because believing that his soul
was not eternal and immortal, he should therefore prefer to be without a
soul (_amens_) and to live without reason; all of which is so absurd as
to be scarcely worth refuting (_quae adeo absurda sunt, ut vix recenseri
mereantur_)."

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that
either it is flagrantly stupid--in which case all comment is
superfluous--or it is somethin