whence it follows that the chances of collision between community and Government are far less, the chances of maintaining that peace which is the end of all government far greater; above all, the identity between rights and powers is far more entire. For these reasons he is apt to describe Democracy as the most 'absolute' form of polity: a malicious use of terms, perhaps intended to mark the gulf which parted him from Hobbes and, prophetically, from other champions of the 'absolute State.' 1

The most original thing in these closing books of the Treatise is the contention, again and again repeated, that a change in the form of government carries with it a change also in the dispositions required as to such crucial, but subordinate, matters as property, military service, religious establishments and the like.

Thus in a Monarchy, where discontent is always likely to arise over taxation and other necessary acts of government, it is expedient that the whole settled property of the community-land and, if possible, houses-should be vested in the ruler, leased (but never sold) to private applicants, and the proceeds of the rent devoted to the expenses of the State: all other taxes being prohibited, except in time of war. In an Aristocracy, on the other hand, such a provision would be a fruitful source of tyranny and oppression; 2 it would probably end in a general exodus of all who did not belong to the privileged body. Under this form of government accordingly, Spinoza demands that the land—which he still seems to conceive of as owned by the State, that is, the privileged caste-should be sold outright to such subjects as are in a position to purchase, with the sole condition that a yearly property tax be paid to the State. In a Monarchy, as in an Aristocracy, it may be noted that he regards all moveable property as being vested absolutely in the private owner: with the restriction that, in a Monarchy at any rate, all investments in foreign securities, all loans to foreign merchants, are prohibited.3

The constitution of the army under the two forms of government presents a similar contrast. In a Monarchy, one of the main securities against oppression is that enlistment of foreign mercenaries shall be absolutely prohibited and that troops shall be levied solely from among the subjects. In an Aristocracy, such a provision is neither necessary nor possible. The levy of troops should, indeed, be made mainly from natives, whether of the

1 T.P. viii. 3; xi. 1; T.T. xvi. 25-38. Elsewhere, he makes a significant variation: Imperium democraticum ad statum naturalem maxime accedit' (T.T. xx. 38).

2 It does not appear why the same danger, perhaps under a less extreme form, does not arise in a monarchy also.

3 T.P. vi. 12; vii. 8; viii. 10.

privileged class or otherwise; and none should be admitted to the Great Council who has not proved himself skilled in the art of war: a provision intended to ensure that a sufficient proportion of the officers should be constantly furnished by the 'patricians,' from whose number, according to a further provision, the Generalin-Chief is invariably to be drawn. But the levy of mercenaries should in no way be prohibited; and for several reasons, among which Spinoza is careful to specify the need of guarding against domestic sedition, it may easily prove desirable.1

The most curious, and certainly the least expected, turn given to the principle under discussion has been reserved till last: its application to the burning question of religious establishments. Of all causes, that of religious and intellectual freedom-the right 'to think as you will and speak as you think '-was that which lay nearest to Spinoza's heart. It was in behalf of this that he had written the Tractatus Theologico-politicus: a more reasoned, if less passionate plea for freedom of thought and utterance than Areopagitica itself. Insisting, like Milton, on the impossibility of imposing limits upon thought and the disastrous folly of imposing them on speech-the injustice of such a policy, the strife and hypocrisy it inevitably begets he had also, like Milton, insisted upon the more positive, and therefore still more vital, side of the same truth. He had proved that the community from which freedom of thought and speech is banished is not a live community, but a dead: not a tree of life springing from a firm root,' but 'a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble, frozen together' at the will of a dull and timorous despot. And he had pleaded that, if there is to be any limitation at all in such matters, the right of imposing it is far better vested in the civil government than in any privileged Church. The one is at least likely to be guided by a sincere, if mistaken, desire for the public good; the other will certainly be swayed by sectarian prejudices, not improbably by personal spites and resentments.5 Indeed a good part of the treatise is devoted to laying bare the evils which fell upon the Jewish Commonwealth from the persistent efforts of the priests and other religious fanatics to make themselves masters of the State.

Under a monarchical government accordingly, Spinoza, in the Political Treatise, expressly. forbids the recognition of any one privileged Church; though, in accordance with the practice of the Roman Empire and many States of his own day, he seems to 1 T.P. vi. 10; viii. 9.

2 This quotation from Tacitus (Hist. i. 1) occurs both in the Preface to T.T. and in the title of the closing chapter (xx.).

3 T.T. xx. 27-35.

4 lb. xx. 11-13.

5 Ib. xx. 20-26.

6 Ib. xvii.-xviii.

have reserved to the State the right of prohibiting certain forms of public worship, as pernicious. Such religious bodies as are permitted to worship in public are to put up their churches at their own expense; and, with the exception just mentioned, no restrictions on freedom of thought and discussion are to be allowed. When account is taken of the necessity, real or supposed, of yielding to human prejudice, which even in the United Provinces was still liable to violent outbreaks, all this is fairly in accordance with the principles laid down in the earlier treatise.1

What, however, are we to say of the corresponding provisions laid down for an Aristocracy? It is essential, in Spinoza's view, that all members of the governing Body should be of the same Confession, and that this Confession should be of the simplest and most catholic'—that is, most comprehensive-cast. Other creeds and other forms of worship are to be permitted on sufferance to members of the subject population. But the chapels appropriated to such worship must be restricted to a specified size and builtit need hardly be said, at the expense of their respective sects—on sites sufficiently scattered. The temples of the national Church,' on the other hand, are to be 'large and stately '; and although the duty of preaching may, in case of need, be devolved on ' plebeians' -a community of dukes was hardly likely to abound in oratorical talent or in unction-none but members of the governing Body should be permitted to administer baptism and other sacraments: to the end, as Spinoza expressly states, that the nobles may be recognised by all as the priests of the national religion, its champions and interpreters.2

The general purpose of these somewhat startling provisions, as the author explains, is to prevent religious dissensions among the members of the privileged class and, by the same stroke, to secure liberty of worship-it is true, with considerable limitations -for the unprivileged multitude': a liberty which might be imperilled if one sect were likely to find a backing among the aristocracy at the expense of the rest. Whether the means are well calculated to the end, is open to question. For our purposes, the significant thing is, on the one hand, that to secure liberty in the gross Spinoza should have been willing to make such trenchant sacrifices of it in detail; and on the other hand, that his conviction as to the need of adapting the whole life of the community to the ideal embodied in its form of government should have been strong enough to force his acceptance of a consequence which to many minds will seem so remote and which to his own mind can hardly have been anything but violently unpalatable.

No one of the applications which the principle receives from 2 Ib. viii. 46.

1 T.P. vi. 40.

Spinoza appears to be especially cogent. So much must be frankly admitted. The importance of his argument lies not in the applications, but in the principle itself. Broadly stated, it is the principle that the life of the community is not a mechanism made up of isolated acts and formal institutions, but a vital organism, each one of whose parts reacts upon the others, each one of whose acts qualifies, and is qualified by, the rest. It would be idle to pretend either that he applied this principle as fruitfully, or even that he grasped its scope as fully, as many who came after him. After all, he was a precursor. But Montesquieu, and in another way Burke, were to build their fame upon the principle which he here implicitly lays down.

Spinoza's theory stands or falls by his identification of rights with powers: in other words, by his refusal to admit the idea of Right into the life of the State. If this initial assumption cannot be made good; if it can be shown that the idea of Right, as opposed to power, is essential to the existence of the State, that without it there can be no lasting and steady bond either between citizen and citizen, or between the Government and the governed, then the whole argument fails, the whole fabric crumbles to pieces. Our one business, therefore, is to ask: How far is such a theory in accordance with the facts of our experience? how far is it possible that any State should maintain itself without some sense, however imperfect, of obligation between its members, without some recognition of mutual duties between the Government and the governed?

It is the surpassing merit of Spinoza to bring this question swiftly and sharply to an issue. How swiftly and how sharply, is best seen by a reference to two other writers who, in a greater or less degree, have accepted the same principle, but who, for good or for bad reasons, have not carried it out with the same ruthless consistency. Hobbes, as we have seen, persistently confuses the issue by juggling with the utterly incompatible principle of 'natural law': that is, with the idea of duty. Burke again, while accepting the principle of expediency-and that, with infinite qualifications in the sphere of politics, would, we may be very sure, have indignantly rejected it in the field of ethics. Spinoza, on the other hand, applies it with the same thoroughness in the one domain as in the other. He banishes the idea of duty, of Right, not only from the field of politics, but from that of ethics also. His exclusion is not limited to the relations between citizen and citizen; it reaches also to the simplest and most personal relations between man and man. It is clear that, by so doing, he

reduces the problem to the most elementary form which it is capable of taking.

That, in itself, is enough to set the two Treatises in a place apart. Nowhere else—unless perhaps in the pages of Hume, whose Politics, however, are avowedly fragmentary-do we find the exclusion of Right enforced with such rigorous consistency; nowhere else do we find the utilitarian solution presented so fully or with such remorseless clearness; nowhere else do we find results so fruitful wrung out of the principle of expediency. Here, therefore, if anywhere, that principle enters the field with every chance in its favour that courage and genius can give it. And if even Spinoza's advocacy cannot carry it to victory, we may fairly conclude that the fault lies not in its champion, but in itself.

What we have to assume, then, is a community from which all belief in duty, in any kind of moral obligation, is rigidly barred out: barred out not only from its corporate life, from all relations between citizen and citizen, between the Government and the governed, but also from its purely social life, from all the countless and ceaselessly shifting relations which are for ever weaving themselves between one individual and another. We are forced to add the latter condition, partly because the idea of duty is as stiffly banished from the ethical system of Spinoza as it is from his political system: partly because that idea-even if it were admitted in words, which it is not-is, as an operative motive, inevitably barred out by the rigidly necessarian doctrine of the author; partly again because, as he never ceases to remind us, the 'life of reason,' the life laid before us in the closing Book of the Ethics, is the attainment only of the few, while by far the greater part of mankind judge of expediency purely by their lusts and are swayed solely by their passions': in other words, because, in practice as well as in theory, they renounce all bonds of obligation to others, so that the only check left upon their madness is to be found in the terrors of the Law.1

Given such a community, what chance is there, we ask, that even the terrors of the Law will long suffice to keep the peace between the warring passions of its members? How, even when most effectual, can the terrors of the Law touch anything but what is most external and least vital in the dealings of one man with

1 Fit raro ut homines ex ductu rationis vivant' (Eth. iv. 35); see also T.T. v. 21; xvi. 6-7; T.P. ii. 5-8. It must be remembered, however, that in the next Proposition of the Ethics (iv. 36) he expressly says: 'Summum bonum omnibus commune est.' So it is, in the sense that all men would be happier, if they could only bring themselves to live by the light of reason.' But that is just what, in Spinoza's view, the majority of them will never do.