dea of Him is native to the
soul as a necessary part of its "furnishings," and is the condition of
thinking anything at all.[27]

Spinoza, though bringing to his philosophy elements which are foreign to
Descartes, and though fusing his otherwise mathematical and logical
system with the warmth and fervour of mystical experience that is wholly
lacking in the French philosopher, carried Cartesianism to its logical
culmination, and has given the world one of the most impressive
presentations that ever has been given of the view that all things centre
in God and are involved in His existence, that it belongs to the very
nature of the {126} human mind to know God, and that all peace and
felicity come from "the love of an infinite and eternal object which
feeds the soul with changeless and unmingled joy." He, too, had his
conversion-awakening which took him above the love of earthly things, and
through it he found an unvarying centre for his heart's devotion, which
made his life, outwardly extremely humble, inwardly one of the noblest
and most saintly in the history of philosophy. "After experience had
taught me," he writes in the opening of his early _Treatise on the
Improvement of the Understanding_, "that all things which are ordinarily
encountered in common life are vain and futile~.~.~. I at length
determined to inquire if there were anything which was a TRUE GOOD,
capable of imparting itself, and by which alone the mind could be
affected to the exclusion of all else; whether, indeed, anything existed
by the discovery and acquisition of which I might have continuous and
supreme joy to all eternity," and the remainder of his life was
penetrated by a noble passion for the Eternal, and dedicated to the
interpretation of the Highest Good which he had discovered, and which
henceforth no rival good was ever to eclipse. Dr. A. Wolf well says of
him: "His moral ardour seems almost aglow with mystic fire, and if we may
not call him a priest of the most high God, yet he was certainly a
prophet of the power which makes for righteousness."[28] He is giving
his own experience in the spiritual principle which he laid down early in
his life: "So long as we have not such a clear idea of God as shall unite
us with Him in such a way that it will not let us love anything beside
Him, we cannot truly say that we are united with God, so as to depend
immediately on Him."[29]

It is Spinoza's primary principle that the only Reality in the