ABSTRACT
Like much else in his philosophy, Spinoza’s theory of the mind is original, speculative, and difficult to understand. It has met with violently differing reactions: some have rejected it outright (e.g. Froude I, p. 367); others have found in it the solution to the riddles left by Descartes (e.g. Jonas, pp. 262-3). One thing at least is certain: among the great thinkers of the past, Spinoza stands out for insistence that the human mind is a part of Nature, subject to its causal order, and capable of being understood by scientific methods. Human beings imagine themselves to occupy a privileged position, he asserts, likening themselves to a State within the greater State of Nature (TP, II), but this is a delusion. Nor is the error confined to the vulgar: learned men and philosophers have maintained that ‘man disturbs rather than follows Nature’s order, that he has an absolute power over his own actions, that he is altogether self-determined’. But to say this is to make human conduct unintelligible; for ‘there must be one and the same method for understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, that is, by the universal laws and rules of Nature’. It follows that the properties of human minds can only be grasped if we adopt a method of studying them which is also fitted for studying the properties of bodies in motion. The teaching of other philosophers has not of course been wholly without value: they ‘have written many excellent things about the right conduct of life, and have given mortals counsels full of prudence’. But we must rebuke them for having failed to discover ‘the nature and strength of the affects, and what the mind is able to do towards controlling them’. Even Descartes, who attempted to study the soul scientifically, started from these erroneous presuppositions, and so succeeded only in revealing ‘the acuteness of his great intellect’. Indeed, the vulgar, false, flattering and destructive picture of human nature appears in its fullest colours in Descartes’ work: for he tells us himself that there is ‘one thing in us which might give us reason to esteem ourselves, to wit, the use of our free will, and the empire we possess over our wishes… This in a certain measure renders us like God in making us masters of ourselves’. Descartes’ belief in free will, and his consequent denial that human conduct can be explained in terms of causal laws, may be the most prominent of his errors, but they spring from a deeper source. The basic trouble lies in his account of the mind’s relation to the body. Since Spinoza’s own theory owed so much to Descartes’, it is useful to begin by outlining the Cartesian view. This will enable us to understand more clearly what Spinoza absorbed from his great predecessor, and what he rejected.
