ng
sense of the futility of life save as life perfected itself in
contemplations of an eternal excellency and communion with something far
greater than itself. "After experience had taught me," he says (and this
is quoted from Royce's "Spirit of Modern Philosophy"), "that all the
usual surroundings of social life are vain and futile, seeing that none
of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good
or bad except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally
resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good which would
affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else, whether there
might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me
to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness."

Now there is in all this a strangely modern note--dissatisfaction with
what is offered by the commonplace and the accepted, a great emphasis
upon the mind as the key to the readjustments of life, a quest for some
single formula which would offer "continuous, supreme and unending
happiness." This is exactly what Mary Baker Eddy and all the other
perplexed and bodily broken "seekers" who gathered about Quimby were
really wanting and this is what, for one reason or another, the
proffered religious experiences of their time failed to secure them.
"This was, then," to quote Royce, "the beginning of Spinoza's Pilgrim's
Progress." (As indeed it is the beginning of every Pilgrim's Progress.)
"But now, for what distinguishes him from other mystics and makes him a
philosopher and not a mere exhorter, he has his religious passion, he
must reflect upon it ... the philosopher must justify his faith."

We have no need here to follow Spinoza along all the way, difficult and
misty enough, by which he sought to justify his faith. The outstanding
fact is enough. He is a mystic who reasons his way through where the
elder mystic has felt his way through, and the goal which he finally
reaches, though it be the goal which the earlier mystics had found by
other roads,--the loss of self in God--is none the less such an
achievement of reason as Spinoza was able to compass.

_Kant Reaffirms the Creative Power of Mind_

So this polisher of lenses bequeathed to the century which followed him
its greatest inheritance and set for it its greatest task: the inner
life as the supreme concern of the philosopher and the discovery of its
laws and the interpretations of its realities the supreme task of
phil