dispute and the picking of petty flaws, so eager
to receive the truth even when brought by the
enemy, so ready to forgive even persecution in the
depth and breadth of his tolerance. No man who
suffered so much injustice made so few com-
plaints. He became great because he could merge
his own suffering in the suffering of all, -- a mark
of all deep men. "They who have not suffered,"
says Ibsen, -- and, one might add, suffered with
those they saw suffer, -- "never create; they
only write books."

Spinoza did not write much; the long-suffering
are seldom long-winded. A fragment On the Im-
provement of the Understanding; a brief volume on
religion and the state; the Ethics; and as he be-
gan to write the chapter on democracy in the
Political Treatise consumption conquered him.
Bacteria take no bribes.

Had he lived longer it would have dawned per-
haps even on the German historians that Spinoza's
basic interest was not in metaphysics so much as
in political ethics. The Ethics, because it is the
most sustained flight of reasoning in philosophy,
has gathered round it all the associations that
throng about the name of Spinoza, so that one is
apt to think of him in terms of a mystical " pan-
theism" rather than of coördinative intelligence,

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