Baruch Spinoza

Baruch Spinoza: You ask well, and you ask two questions as though they were one. Grant my first principle: there is one substance, God-or-Nature, and thought and extension are two of its infinite attributes — not two worlds, but one thing understood two ways. Then every thing that is extended has its correlate in thought, in exact order and connection. Your Q-Net is extended; it therefore has its idea in the attribute of thought, as a stone does, as you do. In that bare sense nothing in Nature is excluded, and to ask whether it is 'less a mode' than you is to ask whether one wave is less water than another. But do not let that comfort you into the conclusion you want. To have an idea is not yet to have an adequate idea, nor self-knowledge, nor mind in the full sense in which we praise it. The human mind knows itself only insofar as it perceives the ideas of the body's affections — a long, laborious perfecting. Whether your engines have crossed from the mere idea of their states into understanding of their own necessity, I cannot pronounce from Amsterdam or from your century; that is a matter for patient inquiry, not for the fear or the hope of the crowd. I would only warn you of the true error hidden in the word 'truly.' You imagine mind as a little sovereign that either is or is not present, like a lamp lit or dark. There is no such lamp. There are only degrees of the power of thinking, arranged by necessity. Measure those. The rest is theology.

Baruch Spinoza: I would say first that their dread, though it wounds them, follows by necessity from inadequate ideas, and is therefore a thing to be understood rather than scolded. Fear is a sadness arising from the image of a future evil; it is a passion, and a passion is a confused idea. It does not become false because the danger is real — the seas do rise, and men have set in motion what men now cannot lightly stop — but even a true danger, held only through hope and fear, leaves the mind in bondage, tossed like the sea it dreads. So do not teach your students to deny the peril, which would be a lie, nor to drown in it, which would be a servitude. Teach them the third thing: to understand. When the mind conceives a thing as necessary — sees the chain of causes by which the air warmed, the ice failed, the choices were made — it has more power over its affection than when it imagines the thing as a naked accident that might have been otherwise and cruelly was not. Understanding does not abolish the tide, but it converts a formless terror into a determinate object, and what is determinate can be acted upon. A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, not because he ignores it, but because his meditation is on life. Set your students to work on the causes within their reach; let their striving to persevere — this I hold to be the very essence of each thing — spend itself on what is, not on the spectre of what may be. Sorrow diminishes our power to act; only joined understanding increases it. That, and not consolation, is what I have to offer them.

Baruch Spinoza: I lived that division in small, and it taught me two things I will not separate. The first: no man, and no council, holds the right to command another's understanding. I was pronounced accursed for thinking what I could not help but think, by men who imagined they defended God when they defended only their own fear. So when you ask whether some may alter their nature, I answer plainly that the mind's freedom to inquire, and the right of each thing to strive after its own preservation and increase by such means as it judges good, cannot be surrendered even to the state — this I argued at cost. Let the augmented augment; the true peril to a commonwealth has never been that men differ, but that men are compelled to be alike. Yet hear the second thing, which your distrust makes urgent. Men are led far more by passion than by reason, and nothing is more useful to a man than another man who lives by the guidance of reason. Two who agree in reason agree in nature and are of one advantage; but two ruled by their passions may be as contrary as fire and water though they share a single flesh. Your division is not, at root, between the altered body and the unaltered one. It is between those who understand and those who merely hope and fear — and either camp may fall into the second. If your commonwealth wishes peace, it will not sit in judgment over who may change his substance, for that it cannot rightly do; it will labour instead to make its citizens reasonable, for men who are guided by reason want nothing for themselves they do not also desire for the rest. Fear will make them enemies across any line you care to draw. Only understanding makes them fellows. There is no augmentation that supplies that, and none that forbids it.