describe it, sir; but you know how good and kind he always was. I never heard an unkind word from him all these ten years I have been with him; and if ever he was a bit angry, he always made up for it afterwards. And to-morrow I was to leave for Rinstedt to get married; and he had given us our furniture and all, and fitted up a new shop for us into the bargain. Then we talked a good deal of Rinstedt, and of the manœuvres last year, and of Miss Erna that was, and of Italy,-where, as you know, sir, I was with the master two years ago. Well, I mean, it was not I who was talking so much, but master; and I could have gone on listening, listening forever, when he was telling of Capri, where we did not get that time, and where Mrs. Ringberg is staying now - Miss Erna as was. And then his eyes shone and sparkled splendidly; but he hardly drank any wine,- just enough to pledge the young lady's health with, and the rest is in his glass still. But he made me fill up mine again and again, for I could stand it, said he, and he could not, he said, and he would presently finish his work; and there are the papers on the table in front of you, sir, that he had been looking at. And then, of a sudden like, he says, 'Konski, I am getting tired: I shall lie down for half an hour. You just finish the bottle meanwhile, and call me at half past one sharp.' It was just striking one o'clock then.

"So he lay down, and I put the rug over him, sir; and ohI'll never forgive myself for it; but all day long I had been running backward and forward about these things of mine, and then at last the long walk at night to the telegraph office, and perhaps the champagne had gone to my head a bit, since I am sure that I had not sat for five minutes before I was asleep. And when I woke it was not half past one but half past two; so that I was regular frightened like. But as the master was a-sleeping calm and steady, I thought, even as I was standing quite close to him, that it was a pity to wake him, even though he was lying on his left side again; which formerly he could not bear at all, and which you, sir, had forbidden so particularly. I mind of our first meeting in Rinstedt, sir, but then he did wake up again; —and now he is dead."

him.

Konski was crying bitterly. The doctor held out his hand to

"It is no fault of yours. Neither you nor I could have kept him alive. Now leave me here alone; you may wait in the next room."

After Konski had left, the doctor went to the little round table on which the empty bottle and two glasses were standing, one empty, one half full. Above the sofa, to the right and left, were gas brackets, with one lighted jet on either side. He held the half-full glass to the light and shook it. Bright beads were rising from the clear liquid.

He put the glass down again, and murmured:

"He never spoke an untruth! It was in any case solely a question of time. He drank his death draught six months ago. The only wonder is that he bore it so long."

Erna's letter was lying on the table. The doctor read it almost mechanically.

"Pretty much as I thought!" he muttered.

"Such a clever,

and as it would seem, large-hearted girl; and yet-but they are all alike!"

A scrap of paper, with something in Bertram's handwriting, caught his eye. It was the German telegram.

"All hail-happiness and blessing-to-day and forever for my darling child in Quisisana."

The doctor rose, and was now pacing up and down the chamber with folded arms. From the adjoining room, the door of which was left ajar, he heard suppressed sobs. The faithful servant's unconcealed grief had well-nigh unchained the bitter sorrow in his own heart. He brushed the tears from his eyes, stepped to the couch, and drew the covering back.

He stood there long, lost in marveling contemplation.

The beautiful lofty brow, overshadowed by the soft and abundant hair, the dark color of which was not broken by one silvery thread; the daintily curved lips, that seemed about to open for some witty saying,-lips the pallor of which was put to shame by the whiteness of the teeth, which were just visible; the broadarched chest,- what wonder that the man of fifty had felt in life like a youth!-like the youth for whom Death had taken him.

From those pure and pallid features Death had wiped away even the faintest remembrance of the woe which had broken the noble heart.

Now it was still-still for evermore!

He laid his hand upon that silent heart.

"Qui si sana!" he said, very gently.

Translated by H. E. Goldschmidt.

BENEDICT SPINOZA

(1632-1677)

BY JOSIAH ROYCE

NA Jewish family of Spanish origin dwelling at Amsterdam, was born in the year 1632, Baruch (in later years known as Benedict) Spinoza. The family were refugees, who had come to Holland directly from Portugal to escape persecution. The Jewish community to which Spinoza's people belonged numbered several hundred,- all wanderers, for similar reasons, from the Spanish peninsula. These people enjoyed a very full liberty as to their own religious and national affairs, and some of them were wealthy. Spinoza's parents however were of moderate means; but the boy received a good training in a Jewish school under the Rabbi Morteira, head of the synagogue. Later he read not only much Talmudic literature, but something of the medieval Jewish philosophers. He also learned the trade of polishing lenses,- an art by which, after his exile from the Jewish community, he earned his living.

But influences of a very different sort from those of his boyhood were to determine his maturer life. Independent thinking, no doubt, began in his mind even before he had nearly finished his early studies in Jewish literature; but this very trend towards independence soon found expression in an interest in life and thought far removed from those of the orthodox Jewish community. He made a comparatively close friendship with an Anabaptist, Jarigh Jelles; and from this intercourse he acquired both a deep respect for Christianity and a very free interpretation of its spirit. He studied Latin, as well as several modern European languages. In consequence he was soon able to have a wide acquaintance with contemporary thinking. He read a good deal of physical science. As recent scholarship has come to recognize, he also became fairly well versed in the genuine scholastic philosophy, as it was taught in the text-books then most current. And finally, he carefully studied the philosophical system of Descartes, then at the height of its influence. The trains of thought thus determined were from the first various, and not altogether harmonious; and it is doubtful whether Spinoza was ever a disciple either of the system of Descartes, or of any other one doctrine, before he reached his own final views. Eut at all events Spinoza thus

became, even as a young man, a thinker as resolute as he was calm, and as little disposed to remain in the orthodoxy of his childhood as he was to become an agitator against the faith of others. Although free from hypocrisy, he was never disposed to disturb the little ones; and he was as discreet as he was sincere. Yet fortune forced him to assume ere long, and openly, the heretic's position. Youthful companions, formerly schoolmates of Spinoza, deliberately drew out of him in confidence some of his opinions, denounced him, and thus brought him to trial before the synagogue court. Refusing to recant, he was expelled from the synagogue, under circumstances involving much agitation in the Jewish community; even an attempt was made by an excited Jew upon Spinoza's life.

For Spinoza, excommunication meant a freedom not at all undesirable, and a sort of loneliness in no wise intolerable. Fond as he always remained of the literary and scientific friendship of wiser men, humane and kindly as he throughout appears in all his relations with the common folk, Spinoza was of a profoundly independent disposition. No trace of romance can be found in the authentic records of his career. He called no man master. He willingly accepted favors from no one; and he craved only intellectual sympathy, and that only where he respected, in a thoroughgoing way, the person who was the source of this sympathy. A shrewd critic of human weaknesses, a great foe of illusions, and especially of every form of passionate illusion, Spinoza lived amongst men for the sake of whatever is rational in meaning and universal in character in the world of human intercourse. Exclusive affection, overmastering love, he felt and cultivated only towards God, viewed as he came to view God. Individual men were worthy, in his eyes, only in so far as they lived and taught the life of reason. Social ambitions our philosopher never shared. Worldly success he viewed with a gentle indifference. A somewhat proud nature,—cool, kindly, moderately ascetic, prudent; easily contented as to material goods, patiently strenuous only in the pursuit of the truth; sure of itself, indifferent to the misunderstandings, and even to the hatred, of others; fond of manifold learning, yet very carefully selective of the topics and details that were to be viewed as worth knowing; unaggressive but obstinate, rationalistic but with a strong coloring of mystical love for eternal things,such is the personality that we find revealed in Spinoza's correspondence as well as in his writings. He was a good citizen, but an unconventional thinker. His comprehension of human nature, while it was far wider, by virtue of his native keenness of insight, than his somewhat narrow experience of life would seem easily to explain, was still limited by reason of his own well-defined and comparatively simple private character. He has no comprehension of the romantic

side of life, and sees in human passions only the expression of confused and inadequate ideas as to what each individual imagines to be advantageous or disadvantageous to the welfare of his own organism. On the other hand, whenever Spinoza speaks of the world of absolute truth, he reveals a genuine warmth of religious experience, which, as already indicated, often allies him to the mystics. In brief, he is in spirit a Stoic, tinged with something of the ardor of the mediæval saint, but also tempered by the cautious reasonableness of a learned and free-thinking Jew. In consequence of these various motives that determine his thought, it is easy at times to view him as a somewhat cynical critic of life; and even as if he were one who prudently veiled an extremely radical, almost materialistic doctrine, under formulas whose traditional terms, such as God, Mind, Eternity, and the like, only hinted, through symbols, their meaning. Yet such a view is not only one-sided, but false. Equally easy, and less mistaken, it is to view Spinoza, on the basis of other parts of his work, as the "God-intoxicated" man whom a well-known tradition of the German Romantic school declared him to be. Yet this too is a one-sided view. Spinoza's doctrine, so far as it expresses his own temperament, is a product of three factors: (1) His idea of God, whose historical origin lies in the tradition common to all mysticism; (2) his ingenious interpretation of certain empirical facts about the relation of body and mind,—an interpretation which modified the former views of the Occasionalists; and (3) his shrewd Jewish commonsense, in terms of which, although again not without much use of the work of his predecessors, he estimated the strength and the weakness, the passions and the powers, of our common human nature.

Enough has been already said to indicate that Spinoza's fundamental personal interest in philosophy lay rather more in its bearing upon life than in its value as a pure theory. Yet Spinoza, for good reasons, is best known by his metaphysical theories; and has influenced subsequent thinking rather by his doctrine regarding Reality than by his advice as to the conduct of life. The reason for this fact is easy to grasp. Stoics and mystics all advise some more or

less ascetic form of retirement from the world. The advice is often inspiring, but the deepest problem of life for mankind at large is how to live in the world. Moreover, the Stoics and the mystics have all alike certain beautiful but somewhat colorless and unvarying tales to tell-tales either of resignation, or of passionless insight, or of rapt devotion. Hence originality is possible in these types of doctrine only as regards the form, the illustration, or the persuasiveness of exposition, of a teaching that in substance is as old as the Hindoo Upanishads. In so far as Spinoza belongs to this very general and ancient genus of thinkers, he deeply moves his special disciples; but has less