ien world is
sheerly brutal to man's body.

Of course, the ends that are consonant with man's nature are determined
by his nature, so that it may seem we have not really escaped the
fatality of "determinism." This is, however, only seemingly so. Because,
according to the teleological determinism of Christian theology the ends
were fixed independently of the natures that were to fulfill them; just
as, according to instrumental indeterminism events were caused
independently of the natures of the things that caused them. Otherwise
there would be nothing miraculous about miracles and nothing virtuous
about Calvinism. But if the ends are the ends of our natures,--that is,
if teleological determinism is not perverse and arbitrary but rational
and scientific--we are, as Spinoza constantly points out, free. Only
when we are subject to alien ends or the ends of alien natures are we
enslaved. For freedom is not opposed to necessity or determinism; it is
only opposed to an alien necessity or alien determinism. Freedom
consists not in absolute indetermination, but in absolute
self-determination. And self-determination is the very last thing that
can be called fatalistic.

Because Spinoza knew that freedom consists in self-determination he was
saved from falling into the absurdities of Rousseau's "Back to Nature"
doctrine even though Nature is, for Spinoza, the origin of everything
and its laws, the only laws that are divine. Still, the purpose and
conduct of man's life, if they are to be rational, must be defined by
man's nature not by any other nature; if man is to be free, he must be
guided by the particular laws of his own being, not by the laws of any
other being least of all by the general laws of so totally dissimilar a
being as absolutely infinite Nature. There is as much sense and
rationality in exhorting us to go back to the Realm of Nature, as there
is in exhorting us to go on to the City of God.

There is, in Spinoza's system, no teleological determinism (in the
perverted theological usage explained above); but neither is there, in
Spinoza's system, any "free-will" for man. And the hue and cry that is
always raised when "free-will" is denied, was raised against Spinoza.
The clamorous moralists protest that "free-will" is the necessary
(_sic!_) foundation of all morality, and hence of religion. This is the
starting point of Bernard Shaw's no less than of Henry Oldenburg's
infuriated argument. And, unfortunately, no les