Spinoza; a handbook to the Ethics / by J. Allanson Picton.

  • James Allanson Picton
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Spinoza; a handbook to the Ethics / by J. Allanson Picton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    though that something may, as in the case of the blue sky or Mediterranean water, remain unknown to the majority of those on whom the impression of colour is made. Still, though the observer may not know to what the quality belongs, he is sure that it is a quality, and not a substance. Whether the colour be in the observer himself (subjective) or in the external world (objective), in any case it is a quality and not a substance. Returning to Spinoza’s definition of substance, I find Really ° r equivalent it much more akin to Spencer’s idea of the Unknowable to Spencer’s Unknow- than orthodox Spinozists would be prepared to allow, able. For after all, the definition is and must be reached, in the case of ordinary people, by a process of larger and larger generalisations, such as Spencer gives us in his First Principles.1 These generalisations are thus summed up in the concluding words of the chapter on the relativity of all knowledge (p. 83): ‘ On watching our thoughts we have seen how impossible it is to get rid of the consciousness of an Actuality lying behind Ap¬ pearances ; and how from this impossibility results our indestructible belief in that Actuality.’ Happily, Spinoza does not speak of God as lying behind appearances. Otherwise Spencer’s ‘Actuality* and Spinoza’s ‘Sub¬ stance’ are obviously the same thing under different names. Nor is this identity in the least disproved by the different methods of the two philosophers in ap¬ proaching the ultimate reality. For though Spinoza, in The differ- his abstract way, thinks it enough to say curtly that formal and Substance—or ultimate Actuality—is that which is in (and by) itself, and is conceived through itself, or does 1 P. 81, sixth edition.