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    SPINOZA AND TIMEBeing the Fourth " Arthur Davis MemorialLecture " delivered before the JewishHistorical Society at UniversityCollege on Sunday, M*Y jj 19219 Nisan 23, 5831

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    SPINOZA AND TIME

    S. ALEXANDER, M.A., LL.D., F.B.A.Hon. Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford

    Professor of Philosophy in the University of Manchester

    WITH AN AFTERWORD BYVISCOUNT HALDANE, O.M., F.R.S.

    LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN 8c UNWIN LTD.RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

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    First published in 1921

    (All rights reserved)

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    NOTE'T^HE Arthur Davis Memorial Lecture was

    founded in 1917, under the auspices ofthe Jewish Historical Society of England, byhis collaborators in the translation of " TheService of the Synagogue," with the objectof fostering Hebraic thought and learning inhonour of an unworldly scholar. The Lectureis to be given annually in the anniversaryweek of his death, and the lectureship isto be open to men or women of any race orcreed, who are to have absolute liberty inthe treatment of their subject.

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    CONTENTSPAGE

    afterword as foreword . . .iii. the world of events : time as

    intrinsic . . . . 1511. spinoza's conception of time . 21iii. the infinite mode of motion and

    rest . . . . 25iv. the transition from extension to

    this mode. . . . 31v. time as an attribute of god : con-

    sequences of this hypothesis 36(i) the ultimate reality as space-TIME . . . -36(2) MODES AND THE ULTIMATE RE-

    ALITY OF THE SAME STUFF . 40(3) THE GRADES OF REALITYTHE

    HIERARCHY OF LEVELS . . 42(4) THOUGHT AN EMPIRICAL CHARAC-

    TER, NOT AN ATTRIBUTE . 45VI. SPINOZA'S INFINITY OF ATTRI-

    BUTES . . . 50

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    io CONTENTSPAC. E

    VII. (5) RELIGION IN SPINOZA AND THEINTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GOD . 58

    VIII. CHANGES IN THE CONCEPTION OFGOD AND RELIGION. THECONATUS OF SPINOZA AND THEN1SUS 69

    IX. CONCLUSION 79

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    AFTERWORD AS FOREWORDBy Viscount Haldane, O.M., F.R.S.

    I HAVE taken the Chair, by the invitationof this meeting, on the occasion of theremarkable address to which we have justlistened. I have felt it an honour to presideover such a fine audience on such an occasion.Professor Alexander is not only one of your-selves, but he is a man of the highest intel-lectual distinction among the entire people ofthis nation. He is distinguished not less bya certain generous tone and temper which hebrings to bear on his tasks, a tone and temperwhich recall something of the personality ofthe great thinker of whom he has spokento us.

    Professor Alexander has this afternoonplaced his own distinctive interpretation onSpinoza's " Ethics." He has followed out thisline of thought in the remarkable GiffordLectures which he himself has recently pub-lished. Spinozism gets a fresh significancein the new atmosphere of Relativity, with

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    12 AFTERWORD AS FOREWORDwhich Einstein, yet another member of yourcommunity, has recently invested mathe-matical physics and our conception of theuniverse which appears to confront us. Thedoctrine of the space-time continuum yieldsa new outlook for science and philosophyalike, and Professor Alexander has seen this.I should not be candid if I did not say thatfor myself there seems to lie behind thisconception a yet wider one, that of mindas I believe the principle of Relativity leavesus free to interpret it

    as being foundationalto all reality. But that does not make methe less appreciative of the very importantcontribution which our lecturer of this after-noon has made, on this occasion as well asin his recent book, to our understanding ofthe meaning of what we call real.He has dealt more fully than Spinoza didwith the meaning of Time as entering intothe character of existence. The continuumin which it and Space have not yet beendifferentiated is for him the foundationalfact of existence. Over this view manycontroversies will arise. Some of these arealready well in sight. But the great pointis to raise them distinctly, and this ProfessorAlexander has definitely done : already we

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    AFTERWORD AS FOREWORD 13have heard something of this in the addressto which we have just listened, for-my part,with deep interest. To this end no subjectcould have served better as an historicaljumping-off place than the teaching of Spinoza,and this our lecturer has put before us withthe freshness which we anticipated from histouch.Time received at the hands of Spinoza

    something less than justice. It is inseparablefrom Space. Apart from Space we cannotmeasure duration. Look at your watchesand you will see why. The flight of timeand its measurement are measured and madesignificant only by the spatial divisionsthrough which the hands move, and whichascertain their progress. Space and Timehere combine, and become phases of the yetmore concrete actuality of motion or changein the relations of objects.But I did not rise to detain you. We must

    all desire now to go away in order that wemay think over the remarkable paper towhich we have listened, itself a fresh instanceof the indebtedness of the public to yourcommunity for growth in ideas.

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    Spinoza and TimeTHE WORLD OF EVENTS: TIME AS

    INTRINSIC

    IF I were asked to name the most char-acteristic feature of the thought of thelast twenty-five years, I should answer, thediscovery of Time. I do not mean that wehave waited until to-day to become familiarwith Time ; I mean that we have only justbegun, in our speculation, to take Timeseriously, and to realize that in some wayor other Time is an essential ingredient inthe constitution of things. Mr. Bergson,indeed, has declared Time to be the ultimatereality. The mathematicians and physicistsrefer things no longer to three axes of co-ordinates, but to four, the fourth being thetime axis. It will take much thought betweenphysicists and philosophers in co-operation

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    16 SPINOZA AND TIMEbefore opinion settles down upon the exactamount of reality we are to ascribe to Timeand its companion Space, whether they arein the strict sense realities at all, or onlyconstructions of the mind, and what theirrelation to each other is. But there is oneproposition which is vital to the understandingof the theory of relativity, and is presupposedin its finished form as put forward by Mr.Einstein, and that is the proposition thatthe world is a world of events. I fancy weare accustomed to think of the world as amass of things spread out in one compre-hensive Space, and somehow or other Timeis merely an interesting addition, wherebythings happen and have a history. Thediscovery of Time means that we are to ridourselves of this innocent habit of mind,and regard the world as through and throughand intrinsically historical, and treat every-thing in it as events, not merely what areobviously events, but the most permanentthings also, which seem to us fixed in theirreposestones and hills and tableswhichbecome what Mr. Whitehead calls " chunksof events." This is the simple meaning ofthe proposition of the mathematicians thatwe live in a four-dimensional world. It is

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 17another and purely mathematical way ofsaying that Time is not something whichhappens to extended things, but that there isno extended thing which is not temporal, thatthere is no reality but that of events, andthat Space has no reality apart from Time,and that in truth neither has any reality initself, but only as involved ih the ultimatereality of the system of events or Space-Time.

    It is really quite a simple proposition, andthough it is revolutionary enough, it is not sorevolutionary as it sounds. In particular weare not to imagine that, as many people, Ithink, fear, Mr. Einstein and his predecessorshave discovered a new kind of thing or sub-stance. A reputable illustrated newspapergave a picture of what a cube was like infour dimensions : it seemed to be surroundedby a kind of aura or haze. This comes fromsupposing that the four dimensions are allspatial, whereas the fourth is Time. Things,I may assure you, are in the four-dimensionalworld exactly what we are familiar with. Theonly difference is that we have learnt that theyare four-dimensional, chunks of events. Wehave been living all our lives in four dimensions,but have only just come to know it, just as2

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    18 SPINOZA AND TIMEM. Jourdain discovered that he had beentalking prose all his life without knowing it.In his book on Dickens, Mr. Chesterton observesthat M. Jourdain's delight at this discoveryshowed that he had the freshness of theromantic spirit. And I do not know anythingmore romantic than that the common thingswhich surround us, including our own selves,have all this time been in the mathematicalsense four-dimensional. It will not makethem different, nor ourselves better, any morethan when Berkeley maintained that bodieswere but ideas in the mind, he maintainedthem to be less solid than before, though theunmetaphysical Dr. Johnson believed so. Wehave only gained a deeper and more satisfyinginsight.Accordingly, since Time has thus steppedinto the foreground of speculative interest, itseemed to me that I could best respond tothe invitation of this Society to deliver theArthur Davis Memorial Lecture by askinghow far Spinoza could guide us to an under-standing of Time and of the part which itplays in the reality of the world. Theseventeenth century was in philosophy aswell as in physical science the seminal periodof European thought, and, at least in all the

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 19questions that lie on the borderland of phi-losophy and physics, we are nearer to thegreat philosophers of that time than we areto those of the nineteenth century, and ourminds go back to them to get their help ormake clear to ourselves how we differ fromthem. Spinoza is more particularly suitableto consult, apart from the interest which anyJewish society must needs take in one of thegreatest of Jews. For has not Heine said ofhim, with as much truth as wit, alluding toSpinoza's occupation of a maker of lenses,that all subsequent philosophers have seenthrough glasses which Spinoza ground ?

    I do not, however, propose to enter minutelyinto Spinoza's philosophy. There are twoways of approaching a great philosopher. Theone is to study his precise teaching, settingit into relation with his age and with hiscontemporaries and immediate predecessors.I have the greatest admiration for those whoperform this work of scholarship, which isthe only satisfactory and respectful methodof understanding a philosoper, requiring as itdoes both historical research and the mostsympathetic philosophical insight. But it isbeyond my competence, and the only additionI shall attempt to make to the interpretation

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    20 SPINOZA AND TIMEof Spinoza I shall have to omit in addressingyou for want of time. I shall follow the otherand easier method of inquiring what a phi-losopher can teach us in our present problems.Relying on those who have expounded himfor us with such care, I shall repeat what hehas to say upon Time, and then I shall ask,in view of the new prospects opened by ourpresent speculation, what difference it wouldmake to Spinoza's philosophy if we assign toTime a position not allowed to it by Spinozahimself, but suggested by the difficulties andeven obscurities in which he has left it.

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    II

    SPINOZA'S CONCEPTION OF TIME

    THE trouble is that there is very littleto say about Spinoza's conception ofTime. It stands for the general characterwhich things have of existence : they existfor a longer or a shorter time, according asthey are determined by other things. Thusthe momentary closing of a current producesa flash of light ; if the current remains switchedon, the light endures. But when we speak thuswe are, according to Spinoza, not using thelanguage of philosophy but of imagination.We are comparing one duration of time withanother in our sensible world, and we mayeven conceive of these bits of time as limitationsof an indefinite duration. But neither the bitsof duration nor the indefinite duration aretrue realities. We are but using relativemeasures of duration ; because we are con-sidering things as if they were separate fromone another and had an independent existence,whereas thev are but manifestations of the

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    22 SPINOZA AND TIMEone reality which is God. Now just as Newtoncontrasts what he calls the relative measuresof time with absolute Time, we might expectSpinoza to contrast these pieces of durationwith Time or Duration as such. This is whathe does when he considers Space or Extension.There too, when we speak of lengths andfigures of things, we are not dealing withreality except in the confused manner ofimagination. There are no separate lengthsand figures, but only Space as such, which isGod under a certain attribute, and is indivisibleinto lengths. But Spinoza does not contrastdurations with duration as such, but witheternity, and eternity is not Time, but istimeless. When he declares that there issomething eternal in the human mind, whichlies at the basis of our experience that we areimmortal, he does not mean that we are im-mortal in the sense of indefinite continuanceafter death. To be eternal is to be compre-hended in the nature of God, and things arereal in so far as they are thus comprehendedand are seen in the light of eternity, subspecie quddam aeternitatis. Thus times arenot contrasted with Time as bits of spacewith Space, but with timelessness. Hadhe treated Time as he treats Space, Time

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 23would have been an attribute of God. Asit is, Time is no more than a character offinite things. I am proposing to explain whatdifference it would make to Spinoza's philos-ophy if, to make an impossible hypothesis,he had treated Time as an attribute of God.

    It is not so much to be wondered at thatSpinoza has failed to conceive the relationof finite times to infinite Time with the sameclearness as he has conceived that of finitespaces to infinite Space. Time is indeedthoroughly perplexing, in a way in which atfirst sight Space is not. For bits of spacecan be kept together before our minds at once,and though we cannot imagine Space as awhole, but only an indefinitely large space,we can readily think of it. But we cannotdo this with the parts of time. For Time issuccessive ; there is no sense in a durationwhich is not a duration that is passing away,and when you experience a moment of time,the immediately preceding moment is gone.Otherwise Time would be a kind of Space.No doubt we do experience Time as not merelya succession but as a duration, as somethingthat lasts : the moments of time are notdiscontinuous, but are as much continuous asthe points of space. But how can we in our

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    24 SPINOZA AND TIMEthoughts reconcile the persistence of Timewhich we experience, with its habit of dyingfrom one moment to another ? You will saythe past is preserved for us in memory, inwhich the past and the present are before ourminds together, just as the parts of space,distant and near, are before our eyes together.But now comes Mr. Bergson and says thatwhen we thus conceive Time we are spatializingit, turning it into Space, and urges that theTime we thus spatialize is not real Time.

    There are more ways than one of meetingthese difficulties. One was the naive answer ofDescartes, to which we shall recur, thatthings are conserved and endure, because theyare being re-created by God at each moment.This is the very ne plus ultra of the con-ception that I alluded to, that things areextended, and that Time happens to them.Anether way is to show that Space and Timeare not independent of each other, but as themathematicians say, are but aspects or elementsof Space-Time. Spinoza takes neither oneview nor the other, yet he gives us indicationswhich stimulate the reflecting mind to passfrom the one to the other.

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    Ill

    THE INFINITE MODE OF MOTION ANDREST

    LET me first remind you of the main out-lines of Spinoza's metaphysical doctrine.Spinoza is a pantheist, not in the superficialsense that God is a spirit which pervades allthings, but in the truer sense that all thingsare in God and are modifications of him.There is and can be but one being which isentirely self-dependent, needing no other beingfor its explanation ; this being is Substanceor God or Nature : it is the universe as awhole, not as an aggregate of things, not evenas a whole of parts in the sense in which youand I who are organic are wholes of partswithout being mere aggregates, but as aunitary being from which all its so-called partsdraw their nature and in the end their existence.In themselves these parts, or as Spinoza callsthem, modes, have no being except in God.Only our fancy, as I have noted, assignsthem in what he calls the common order of

    25

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    26 SPINOZA AND TIMEnature a fictitious independence. God is theunity of all his modes conceived in theirinterrelation with one another and in theireternal, that is, ultimate and timeless, effluencefrom himself ; and Spinoza tries steadily tothink of God as the positive comprehensionof all things, though, as his commentators havepointed out, he sometimes falls into the mysticalconception which defines God by the negationof all positive predicates.For him the finite is the negation of theinfinite, and not the infinite the negation ofthe finite, however much he may drop intothe other way of thought. In truth, forSpinoza and Descartes and the men of theirday the infinite was conceived positively asprior to the finite, as it is in modern mathe-matics, and in fact it is only by negativing theinfinitude of God that we can arrive at thenotion of quantity at all. To apply the ideaof quantity to God were to make him notinfinite but indefinitely large. Most of ourmodern difficulties have arisen from trying toreconcile the notion of infinity with that ofquantity, and the reconciliation has beenaccomplished in present mathematics.Now, Substance or God presents itself to

    intellect, not to our intellect alone, but to

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 27intellect of every sort, under the form ofattributes. They are not constructions of theintellect nor forms of it in the Kantian sense,but what intellect discovers in the Substance,so that so far there is in Spinoza no suggestionof idealism. God as infinite possesses infinitesuch attributes or aspects, but only two ofthese are discoverable to the*human intellect,namely Extension and Thought. How we areto understand the infinite other attributes is alongstanding puzzle in the interpretation ofSpinoza to which I shall advert later. Theseattributes reveal the whole of God's natureor essence ; and the great forward step whichSpinoza took in philosophy consisted in thisdoctrine. For it follows that since God isperceived completely either as Extension oras Thought or Thinking, Extension andThought are not two different realities, buttwo forms of one and the same reality.

    It follows further that since modes aremodifications of God, each of them is alikeextended and a thought. Hence in the firstplace our thoughts and our bodies are nottwo different things, but the same mode ofGod under two different attributes. This isthe way Spinoza would answer the questionwhether brain-processes and their correspond-

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    28 SPINOZA AND TIMEing thought-processes accompany each otheror act upon each other. For him they arethe same thing twice over ; there is neithercorrespondence nor interaction between them,but identity of essence. This he expressesby saying that an idea or thought is the ideaof a certain condition of the body, whichvaries with the object which provokes thisbodily condition. I only wish there wereroom for me within the limits of my subjectto develop his famous proposition which reallyfollows from this conception, that the ideawhich I have of the table informs me ratherof the state of my body than of the table, orin other words the table reveals itself to mein so far as it induces in me a certain processof body (we should say of the brain) whichis identical with what we call the thought ofthe table.Next it is a consequence of the truth that

    every mode exists under both attributes thatnot only our self but every extended mode isalso a thinking one, and that all things are* in a manner animated.' The importance ofthis we shall see later on.

    So much is simple and clear. But now Ihave to turn to one of the most difficult andat the same time most fascinating parts of

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 29the doctrine. Between God as perceivedunder the attribute of extension and the finiteextended modes which are singular bodiesthere intervene infinite modes which as itwere break the fall from Heaven to earth.Spinoza touches them only lightly, enough forhis immediate purpose of explaining the con-stitution of our bodies, yet it is about thesethat what I have to say centres. The ' im-mediate ' infinite mode of extension Spinoza callsmotion and rest. The first step in breaking upthe unity of God's infinite extension into multi-plicity (a multiplicity still retained within theunity) is its manifestation as motion and rest.The next step is the ' mediate ' infinite mode,in which God's extension is the whole systemof bodies as reduced to terms of motion andrest ; and the finite modes or singular thingsare but the parts of this ' face of the wholeuniverse,' when those parts are considered,as they must be for science, in their rela-tion to the wholeas varying modificationsof motion and rest. These are the gradationsin the specification of God as extended. Thecorresponding gradations between God asa thinking being and finite thinking things orthoughts are harder to identify, and I neednot refer to them further.

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    30 SPINOZA AND TIMEThese immediate and mediate infinite modes

    of motion and rest take us back to the doctrineof Descartes in the second part of his Principles.Spinoza takes it as axiomatic, speaking firstof uncompounded bodies, that they are alleither in motion or at rest, and move eithermore quickly or more slowly. Rest seems tobe regarded as something positive, not themere absence of motion, and a slower motionis as it were the blending of motion withrest, much as Goethe later regarded colouras a blending of light and darkness. Des-cartes apparently, perhaps only apparently,has the same notion. Compound bodies, whatwe ordinarily call bodies, are constituted ofthese simple bodies impinging on one anotherand communicating their motions in a certainproportion. Such an individual body remainsthe same when the proportion of its compo-nent motions is undisturbed, and the whole" moves altogether if it moves at all," andhence, though affected by other bodies in manyways, it may retain its own nature. Theindividual changes if this proportion is dis-turbed. The dissolution of our body at death isa case in point, occurring in a very compositebody composed of many individual bodieswhich are its parts.

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    IVTHE TRANSITION FROM EXTENSION TO

    THIS MODETHE details do not concern us so much.After all, vague as it is, the picture isbut the familiar one that in the end bodiesare complexes of motions. I would fain lingeron its consequences for the theory of science.Motion and rest being the common charactersof bodies, their laws are the ultimate andsimplest conceptions for science, which Spinozacontrasts with such vague and confused con-ceptions as being, thing, something, which hecalls transcendental terms. Motion and restwould be the true universals, in contrastwith what are vaguely called universals, suchas man, tree, etc. But I must not be temptedaway from my immediate topic.For us the question is by what right Spinozacan pass from God's attribute of extension tothe infinite mode of motion and rest. Thathe deliberately faced the problem is clear fromhis attitude towards Descartes. Bodies for

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    32 SPINOZA AND TIMESpinoza are intrinsically complexes of motionand rest. For Descartes body was nothingbut extension, figure, size, in three dimensions.Extension without body, that is empty space,was nothing. An empty space between twobodies or in the pores of a body meant onlythe presence of some other body ; hence,in the famous illustration, if a vessel couldbe completely emptied of body, the sides ofthe vessel would be in contact. Motion,according to Descartes, was a mode or stateof body, and it was imparted to body by God.Spinoza protests in explicit terms in twoletters to his friend Tschirnhaus against theCartesian view and denies that the varietyof the universe can be deduced a priori fromextension alone. Descartes' view that motionis imparted by God is in fact a confession thatbody in motion is not mere extension, ifextension is conceived as by Descartes ascreated, not as by Spinoza as being an attributeof God. Matter, says Spinoza, must neces-sarily be explained through an attribute whichexpresses eternal and infinite essence. Thisattribute he found in Extension, which heconceived to manifest itself immediately aswe have seen in the infinite mode of motionand rest.

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 33Spinoza is thus aware of the problem ;

    and it is a great advance upon Descartes tosee that body or matter is intrinsically motionand rest, and not bare extension into whichmotion is introduced by the creative act ofGod. But has Spinoza solved the problem ?The answer must be, I think, that he hasfailed because he has omitted Time. Itseems to him indeed that matter is motionbecause extension expresses God's essence, oras Mr. Joachim puts it, expresses God'somnipotence. Substance, this admirable inter-preter urges, is not lifeless, but alive, anddoubtless this was at the bottom of Spinoza'smind. But life and omnipotence are undefinedideas, transferred from our experience todescribe metaphorically the being of Godwhich is held to be behind and beyond thethings of experience. Life implies change andso does omnipotence ; and change impliestime. Yet Time is excluded from the eternalnature of God, who comprehends Time indeed,but only, to use a paradoxical phrase, in itstimelessness.

    If, therefore, motion is to be the infinitemode of God's extension, it must be becauseTime has been slipped into Extension out ofthe undefined activity of God. We might be

    3

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    34 SPINOZA AND TIMEtempted to say that extension includes notonly extension in space but duration in time.This would make extension a double-facedattribute. It would solve Spinoza's problem,but there is no word of it in Spinoza and couldnot be. On the contrary, such a suppositionwould make existence of which Time is thegeneral character an attribute of God, whichfor Spinoza it is not. God's essence and hisexistence are, he says, one and the same thing.The truth appears to be that Spinoza couldpass so easily from extension to motionbecause motion was conceived as it werestatically. Nothing seems so obvious to us asthe proposition that motion takes time andis unintelligible without it. But Descartescertainly, and it would seem Spinoza aswell, conceives motion as change of place.Motion Descartes describes as ' the trans-ference of a part of matter or body from theneighbourhood of those which are touchingit immediately and which we consider as atrest to the neighbourhood of some otherbodies.' This conception of motion makes itsomething geometrical instead of physical.Consistently with this conception Descartescould think of motion only as an impulsegiven to matter from God. Spinoza's insight

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 35was a deeper one. Extension being an attri-bute of God reflected the activity of God'snature, and therefore the modes of extensionwere intrinsically motion, to correspond withthe activity of God. He did not see that thisimplied Time also as an attribute. The activityof God could not translate itself into motion,when motion was conceived as more than achange of place, except God's activity wasexpressed by Time. In other words, if motionand rest is the infinite mode of extension, thatextension must be not Space but Space-Time. By insisting that bodies are intrinsicallycomplexes of motion, Spinoza, though he hasrather stated the problem than solved it, hasput us upon the way of solution. 1

    1 I have omitted to notice minor difficulties inSpinoza's doctrine of motion and rest, such as thequestion how simple bodies come to have variety ofmotion. (See Camerer, Die Lehre Spinozas, 1877,p. 61 ff.) For an admirable account of the difficultiesof Descartes' treatment of motion, see N. KempSmith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, London,1902, pp. 75 ff.

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    TIME AS AN ATTRIBUTE OF GOD:CONSEQUENCES OF THIS HYPOTHESIS

    LET us ask then what changes are producedin Spinoza's doctrine if we regard Timeitself as an attribute of the ultimate reality.In what remains I propose to offer these con-sequences as a gloss upon Spinoza's teaching,remarking explicitly that they are a gloss andnot a commentary. A commentary must be his-torically true, but for Spinoza it was impossibleto think of Time as an attribute. Slight asthe change may seem verbally, it leads to aremodelling of the whole. Yet unhistorical asthe procedure is, I venture upon it before anHistorical Society because the real greatnessand spirit of a man may often be best appre-ciated by asking not what he said himselfbut what he may lead us to say.

    (i) In the first place the ultimate realitywould be something which in one aspect, underone attribute, is Space, under another, Time.It would be Space-Time or Motion itself.36

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 37I dare not yet assume that Time in thisconception replaces Thought as the secondattribute which our intellect perceives. Itmight still be true that Thought is a thirdattribute. It will appear, however, presentlythat Thought is not an attribute at all, butis an empirical or finite mode.The ultimate reality or Space-Time ceasesalso to be Substance in Spinoza's sense, stillless is it identifiable with God, which is forSpinoza the only substance. It is ratheridentical with the infinite immediate mode ofmotion and rest, or if we rid ourselves of theperplexing idea of rest as something positive,with the infinite mode of motion. It is stillinfinite and self-contained and the ground ofall finite modes. But it is not so much theSubstance of which things are modes as thestuff of which they are pieces, the materialout of which they are made. It is comparablerather to the Space which in the PlatonicTimcens is that which receives definite characterthrough the ingression (I borrow the wordfrom Mr. Whitehead) of the Forms or Ideas.The difference from Plato is that the materialwhich thus receives form is in the Timauspurely spatial, and contains intrinsically notime. For Plato Time comes into being with

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    38 SPINOZA AND TIMEthe creation of things and is but the shadowof eternity. In our gloss upon Spinoza theultimate reality is full of Time, not timelessbut essentially alive with Time, and thetheatre of incessant change. It is only time-less in the sense that taken as a whole it isnot particularized to any one moment orduration, but comprehends them all.For Spinoza the ultimate reality wasnecessarily conceived as Substance, as the oneself-dependent, self-contained or infinite, self-caused, being ; this distinguished it from thefinite things which were its modes. The verydifference and advance which he made uponDescartes was that created things, which forDescartes were in a secondary sense sub-stances, became for Spinoza mere modes ofthe one Substance. And at least it is clearthat if the ultimate reality is described asSubstance, finite things, which in the wordsof Locke " are but retainers to other parts ofnature for that which they are most takennotice of by us," cannot be substances in thesame sense. But in fact substance, causalityand the like are categories applicable in thefirst instance to finite things, and only trans-ferred to infinite reality by a metaphor inwhich their meaning is changed ; and it has

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 39now become a commonplace since Kant todeclare that the categories of finite things arenot applicable to the ground of finite things.And when once Time is regarded as an attributeof ultimate reality, the contrast of the Spino-zistic Substance and its modes falls away.Reality is Space-Time or motion itself, infiniteor self-contained and having nothing outsideitself ; and the vital contrast is that of thisinfinite or a priori stuff of the Universe andthe empirical things or substances which areparts or modes of it. For this reason I speakof the ultimate reality of motion not assubstance but as stuff.

    Before passing to these empirical modes letme observe that the conception of Space-Time or Motion as the stuff of the Universe isnot in all respects the same as that taken ofit in the theory of relativity. That theory isa physical and not a metaphysical theory,and, properly, as a physical theory it beginswith bodies. Space-Time for it is perhapsbest described as an order or system of relationsthat subsists between bodies. Whether this isto be accepted as an ultimate statement forphilosophy is just one of those matters towhich I alluded at the beginning, on whichdiscussion has yet to do its work. I may

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    40 SPINOZA AND TIMEmerely note in passing that one pronouncedsupporter of the relativity theory in thiscountry maintains that when it is said thatSpace-Time is wrinkled or warped in thepresence of matter this means that matter isthe very wrinkle in Space-Time. From thisto the proposition which I have taken asincluded in our gloss upon Spinoza, viz. thatSpace-Time is the stuff of which matter ismade, is but a step.

    (2) I pass to the singular things which intheir totality constitute the fades totiusuniversi. As with Spinoza, they are modifica-tions of the ultimate reality which has nowbecome Space-Time. But there is now noditch to jump between the ultimate groundof things and things themselves ; for thingsare, as Spinoza himself would say, but com-plexes of motion and made of the stuff whichthe ultimate or a priori reality is. In this waythe danger is avoided which besets Spinoza'sdoctrine, the danger that the modes or thingsshould be engulfed in an ultimate being whichpurports to be the positive ground of its modes,but always is on the point of slipping intobare indefiniteness.

    This danger I have noted already, but itmay be well to revert to it here by way of

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 41pointing out the source of the difficulty.The modes for Spinoza determine each otherinto existence within the modal system in achain of causation. But they follow, con-sidered in the light of eternity, from the natureof Substance or God, who is their cause orground. This causal issuing from God is,however, not the physical relation of causeand effect, but the geometrical one of groundand consequent. The modes follow fromGod as the properties of a triangle followfrom the nature of the triangle. This beingso, the ultimate Substance being the groundof the modes must be a positive reality whichaccounts for them, of which they are, in modernphrase, the appearance. But then, we haveto urge, the modes are not properties ofSubstance, but are things.On the other hand, if we ask for the groundof these things which are modes, and are toldthat they follow from the ground, but thatthe characters which things possess in thecommon order of nature are the confuseddeliverances of our imagination, how can weconceive the ground otherwise than as some-thing or other, we know not what except thatit is their ground ? The case is different ifthings are regarded as modes of the stuff

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    42 SPINOZA AND TIMEwhich is Space-Time. Their relation to theirground is no longer that of the propertiesof a triangle to the triangle, but rather thatof the two triangles which compose an oblongto the oblong. They are involved in theoblong ; and in like manner the valley andthe mountain are both contained in that con-figuration of nature which we call a valleyor a mountain, but the valley does not followfrom the mountain geometrically in the sensein which the properties of the triangle followfrom the triangle.But if the reality in its barest characteris Space-Time, the face of the whole universeis the totality of all those configurations intowhich Space-Time falls through its inherentcharacter of timefulness or restlessness. Thestuff of reality is not stagnant, its soul's wingsare never furled, and in virtue of this unceasingmovement it strikes out fresh complexes ofmovements, created things.

    (3) This leads us directly to a third con-sequence. All things as in God are alikeperfect ; they are what they are and can-not be other. Yet there are grades of per-fection amongst things, the one has morereality than another. On this subject, asI cannot express Spinoza's sense so well

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 43myself, I will transcribe a page from Mr.Joachim's book : T" God, as the necessary consequent of hisown free causality, is Natura Naturataan ordered system of modes following withcoherent necessity from Natura Naturans.1But though all things follow with the sameinevitable necessity from God's nature, theydiffer from one another in degree of perfectionor reality ; and indeed the difference is onenot only of degree but also of kind. ' Foralthough a mouse and an angel, sadness andjoy, depend equally on God, yet a mousecannot be a species of angel, nor sadness aspecies of joy' (Ep. 23). 'The criminalexpresses God's will in his own way, just asthe good man does in his ; but the criminal is

    1 H. H. Joachim, A Study of the Ethics of Spinoza,Oxford, 1 90 1, p. 73.

    1 For the distinction of natura naturans andnaturata, see Eth. i. 29, Sch. God as free causeis natura naturans ; natura naturata is all themodes of God's attributes, so far as they are con-sidered as things which are in God and which cannoteither be or be conceived without God. See Mr.Joachim's note 1, p. 65. Mr. Joachim adds thatNatura naturata is not the world of sense-percep-tion, but the universe in all its articulation as a per-fect understanding would grasp it, if that understand-ing apprehended it as the effect of God's causality."

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    44 SPINOZA AND TIMEnot on that account comparable with the goodman. The more perfection a thing has, themore it participates in the divine nature andthe more it expresses God's perfection. Thegood have incalculably more perfection thanthe vicious ; and therefore their " virtue " isnot to be compared with the

    "virtue

    "of thevicious. . . .' (Ep. 19.)" It is in ' natura naturata,' the eternal

    system of modes, that those degrees of per-fection or reality are exhibited. For there isan order in the

    sequence of the modes fromGod's nature, and on that order their degreeof perfection depends. The order is not atemporal, but a logical one. There is no beforeand after, no temporal succession, in therelation of the modes to God ; all modes arethe eternal consequence of God's causality.But there is a logical priority and posteriority ;and on this their degrees of reality depend.' That effect is the most perfect which isproduced by God immediately ; and the moremediating causes which any effect requires, theless perfect it is.' (Eth. i. App.) "Now directly Time has become an attributeof the ultimate reality, this order ceases tobe merely a logical one, and becomes temporal.The grades of modal perfection are no longer

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 45a ' static ' series of forms, but a hierarchy pro-duced in the order of time. The idea ofevolution is introduced, and from matter orfrom before matter there have grown up intime the modes of physical existence, andthence the forms of life and finally of mind.Existence is stratified, level upon level witheach its distinctive quality, and the strataare not barely superposed, but each higherlevel is the descendant in time of the lower.Hence, for instance, living things are notmerely alive, but their life is a differentiationof physico-chemical body, and that body isbut a particular complexity of mere matter.Upon what particular basis bare matterdepends is a question not for the philosopherbut the physicist to decide. If the old doctrineof the Timaus should be true, according towhich solid matter is composed of elementaryfigures in space, we should have the notionhere suggested as flowing from our gloss uponSpinoza, that the primary modes are the meredifferentiations of bare Space-Time. But allthe particular history of this long descent(or call it rather ascent) to higher levels ofperfection amongst the modes is to be tracedempirically under the guidance of science.

    (4) The last level of things accessible to our

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    46 SPINOZA AND TIMEsenses would be that of minds, or as Spinozawould call them thinking things. Thought,therefore, upon our gloss becomes not anattribute of the ultimate reality but the dis-tinguishing quality of the highest level ofempirical things. We are left with Spaceand Time as the two attributes which ourintellect perceives, and Time displaces Thoughtin the Spinozistic scheme. And yet we arrivealso at a conclusion which seems to repeatSpinoza's view that thought is a universalfeature of things, only with a difference. Allthings for him are in a sense animated, theyare all in their degree thinking things. Forus things which are not minds, which aremerely alive or are inanimate, are no longerminds, but they do bear an aspect, or containin themselves an element, which correspondsto the aspect or element of mind in a thinkingthing. That aspect or element is Time.We may express the relation between theorders of modes in two different ways. Wemay say that life is the mind of the living body,colour the mind of the coloured material body,matter or materiality the mind of the spatio-temporal substructure of a material body.In doing so, we are humouring our propensityto construe things on the pattern of what is

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 47most familiar to us, our own selves, in whichmind is united with a living body ; and arejust comparing one set of empirical things withanother. The other way penetrates moredeeply into the nature of things. It startswith a piece of space-time, in which there arethe bare aspects of its space and its time,and it construes thinking things after thepattern of this. One portion of the livingthing, let us say its brain, is at once a peculiarlydifferentiated portion of space and corre-spondingly and inevitably a peculiarly differ-entiated complex of time. Were it not forthe peculiar complexity of the brain, weshould have the brain a merely living structure ;as it is, when living matter is so differentiatedas to be a brain, its time element becomesmind, or rather the character of mentality. Itis as if we had a clock which not only showedthe time but was the time it showed.

    According, then, to the one method all thingsare, as Spinoza says, thinking things, and inthe end, paradoxical as it sounds to say so,Time is the mind of Space. According tothe other, mind is the time of its brain, lifethe time of the living parts of the livingbody and the like. On either method werealize the same truth that all the world and

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    48 SPINOZA AND TIMEeverything in it are constructed on the sameplan, which betrays itself most plainly inour thinking bodies. But the Spinozisticmethod is a comparison of the modes with oneanother ; the other method views the modesin the light of the ultimate or a priori realityfrom which they derive.The same result is reached from a differentconsideration. Thinking things know, theyhave ideas. The idea of a tree which I havewhen I see one is for Spinoza the thought-aspect of the bodily condition into which Iam thrown by the action of the tree upon mybodily senses. Or as we should say nowadays,it is the inner side of the brain-process. Whatis a brain-process under the attribute ofextension is an idea or thinking process underthe attribute of thought. To think of thetree means to have an idea or a bodily processwhich would be different if the tree werereplaced by a table ; and accordingly if forsome reason or other this bodily conditionrecurs in the absence of the tree I still havethe tree before my view as an image. Whetherthis is or is not a true account of the knowingprocess is under some discussion at the presentmoment among philosophers. But that doesnot concern us here. What does concern us

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 49is that it applies in its degree to all thingsalike whether minds in the empirical sense ornot. The stone knows its surroundings inthe same way as we know ours, though ofcourse not to the same extent. Now, if thisis so, it would seem again, that thought orknowing is a universal character of things andmight claim therefore to be an attribute. Yetonce more, thought as knowing is in truthmerely a relation among the modes. In so faras my mind or the stone is affected by otherthings, it knows them. Accordingly knowing,being an affair of modes inter se, is not anattribute. For an attribute is not a characterwhich arises out of the interrelation of modes,but every mode intrinsically possesses a char-acter in so far as it is considered under anattribute. We again arrive at the conclusionthat thought is empirical, not a priori orultimate ; and so far Space and Time are seento exhaust the attributes of reality.

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    VI*

    SPINOZA'S INFINITY OF ATTRIBUTES

    WHAT then becomes of the infinite otherattributes which the ultimate realityaccording to Spinoza possesses in virtue ofits infinite perfection ? The answer to thisquestion will illustrate the tenor of the fore-going remarks. For we shall see that thesesupposed attributes are otiose and unneces-sary ; but what is more important, we shall seethat Spinoza's justification of them, to mymind successful, depends for itsrforce not uponthe view that Thought is an attribute, but onthe empirical character of particular minds.

    This matter is the standing unresolvedpuzzle of interpretation of Spinoza to which Ihave alluded above. For we are faced with adilemma. All the attributes are in a meta-phorical phrase co-extensive, and accordinglymy mind is identical not only with my body

    1 A reader not interested in Spinoza scholarshipmay be recommended to pass over this section.50

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 51but with modes under all the other attri-buteslet us take one of them for short andcall it the ^-attribute. Why then do I notperceive my #-ian mode as well as my body ?I do not, and Spinoza insists that I cannot(Ep. 64). But if so, there must be thought -modes which correspond not only to body-modes, as they do, but to *-modes, that is (toquote Mr. Joachim *), " there are modes ofThought which are not the thought-side ofmodes of Extension, and the ' completeness 'of the Attribute of Thought is more full thanthe ' completeness ' of any other Attribute,"or as Tschirnhaus put it, the attribute ofThought is much wider than the other Attri-butesis in fact coextensive with them all.Even Mr. Joachim regards the difficulty as

    insoluble. One commentator, Sir F. Pollock,in his excellent book, 2 reminding us that anAttribute is what intellect perceives in Sub-stance as constituting its essence, has acceptedthis last result and given Spinoza's doctrinea kink in the direction of idealism. Yetexactly the same kind of reflection might withproper changes be applied to Extension, which

    1 Op. cit. p. 137.* Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy, 2nd edition,

    London, iSog, p. 162.

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    52 SPINOZA AND TIMEwould then be wider than all the other attri-butes, and Spinoza might thus receive akink in the direction of materialism. Spinozahimself answers Tschirnhaus briefly, and per-haps a little impatiently, in a letter whichI will quote (Ep. 66) : "In answer to yourobjection I say, that although each particularthing be expressed in infinite ways in theinfinite intellect of God, yet those infiniteideas, whereby it is expressed, cannot con-stitute one and the same mind of a particularthing, but infinite minds ; seeing that each ofthese infinite ideas has no connection with therest (and he refers to Eth. ii. 7, and Sch. i.10). If you will reflect on these passagesa little, you will see that all the difficultyvanishes."

    It may be doubted whether a little reflectionis enough or all difficulty vanishes ; but Ibelieve that Spinoza upon his own principlesis right and that his thought is clear, with alittle indulgence for his language. I cannotperceive *-modes because I am a body, andI can only perceive those objects which mybody enables me to apprehend. Rememberthat when Spinoza says that a mode of thought,my idea, has for its ideatum a condition of mybody, he does not say that I perceive that

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 53condition of body. The body is expressed(objectively he says, subjectively we shouldsay) as the idea, but what I perceive is thetree, whose existence is implied in my bodilycondition, because that condition varies withthe perceived object. We perceive extendedthings, and we may also perceive our body,though the perceiving of my body is of coursenot the same idea as corresponds to the con-dition of my body when I perceive the table.Thus I can be said to perceive Realityunder the attribute of extension, and inlike manner I may be said to perceive theattribute of Thought because I apprehendthought in my own person, although it mustbe admitted this statement raises certaindifficulties.Now there is an *-mode corresponding tothe idea and bodily condition I am in whenI perceive the table. But I cannot perceivean *-mode because my particular sort of mindwhich is united to a particular sort of bodyhas no means of perceiving #-modes. Mybodily organs are affected in the world ofmotion and rest by the extended table, butI do not perceive the #-mode of the tablebut only its extension-mode, and consequentlythough my idea has a corresponding #-mode

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    54 SPINOZA AND TIMEI cannot perceive it, because I do not perceive^-objects exterior to my body.

    It may be answered : granted that I do notas a matter of fact perceive the #-mode ofthe table, the question is still, why not ?Does not the #-mode of the table affect the#-mode of my body or mind and throw itinto a condition parallel to the condition ofmy extended body which has for its mentalcorrelate the idea of the table ? The answeris that interaction between a thing like thetable and my body is intelligible only withinthe infinite mode of motion and rest ; butwe cannot speak of #-modes in such terms.We cannot therefore be sure that the ^-corre-spondent of my idea of the table gives me theperception of the stable. It might, for instance,be possible that in order to have perceptionof the #-table there was needed another bodycomposed say of half my body and half yours,or of my body and a stone. The ^-corre-spondent of my body in perceiving the tablemay be only a part of the #-mode which isnecessary for the perception of the stable,which perception consequently would belongto a quite different mind from mine. In otherwords, a different distribution of matter orrather of motion may be required for the

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 55purpose than is afforded by that particulardistribution which constitutes my humanbody.

    I can now return more immediately toSpinoza's own words in his letter. A differentkind of mind is required to apprehend thingsas #-modes, and so it is only such minds whichcan perceive #-modes, e.g. the #-table, and canconsequently perceive themselves also as*-modes. The infinite thought-mode includesevery possible empirical variety of mind, someof which may overlap ours. Such minds wouldof course have extended bodies, but it is easyenough to conceive that they might apprehendx-modes but fail to apprehend modes ofextension, for want of the proper means.I take it that when Spinoza says that eachparticular thing may be expressed in infiniteways in the infinite understar ding of Godhe means that in that infinite understandingthere are minds enough to perceive the #-modeand every other mode of my body or mind ;and that he uses the word ' express ' with somelooseness or inaccuracy, and does not meanthat the x-mode of my mind or body has adifferent mind for its correspondent, but onlya different mind for its percipient. This beinggranted, there is no further difficulty in

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    56 SPINOZA AND TIMESpinoza's reply to the question of Tschirnhausand his modern critics than is implied in thehabitual ambiguity with which he speaks ofan idea sometimes as the idea of the bodilycondition which is its correspondent mode ofextension, sometimes as the idea of the object.

    Spinoza's critics have therefore, I plead,forgotten that what we humans can perceivein the ultimate substance depends on theempirical character of our bodies, on ourparticular distribution of motion and rest,and correspondingly of thought.At the same time, good as Spinoza's defencemay be made, consistently with his pre-suppositions, the defence is only necessarybecause he has taken thought to be an attributeof reality instead of merely an empiricalcharacter of certain complexes of space-time or motion. Substitute Time for Thought,and the whole edifice of infinite other attri-butes is otiose and ur verifiable. It is foundedindeed on the notion that Substance beingthe ground of all things must not only haveattributes which characterize infinite modesbut an infinite number of such attributes.With our gloss, we can be content to notethat mind belongs to certain things in theworld and not to others. There may indeed

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 57be other minds than ours, with bodies differentfrom or more perfect than ours. And it islegitimate enough to suppose that such mindsmay apprehend other characters of thingsthan we do. Why should colour, taste, etc., bethe only secondary qualities of things ? Butthere is no reason why we should assume thatthe objects perceived by such minds shouldbe other than material or quasi-materialobjects like ours, and like them modes ofextension or rather complexes of motion. Theusefulness of other minds is in probing to thefull the riches and variety of the fades totiusuniversi. Perfection we shall find not inthe arbitrary imagination of attributes whichcannot fall within our human ken, but in thehierarchy of the verifiable qualities of the realworld, culminating in the quality character-istic of God.What remai is of Spinoza's doctrine upon our

    gloss is not that there are infinite attributesbut that there are infinite levels of the modes,that there is no end to the hierarchy of qualitiesamongst finite things.

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    VII(5) RELIGION IN SPINOZA

    AND THE INTELLECTUAL LOVE OF GODA MOST important, and perhaps the mostinteresting, question is the consequencefor the conceptions of religion and God ofrecognizing Time to be an attribute. Spinoza'sofficial description of religion is this : " What-soever we desire and do, of which we are thecause, in so far as we have the idea of God,or know God, I set down to religion " (iv. 38,note 1). This describes the religious life, andis in the spirit of the words, " who sweepsa room as for Thy laws makes that, and theaction, fine." But when we ask what is thenature of the religious emotion and what isGod who is its object, we must carry ourthoughts further. God for Spinoza is identicalwith Substance and is the whole universe.This belief is not demonstrated, or is onlyformally demonstrated, it is a restatement ofthe definition of God. Spinoza's conceptionof God is none the worse for being presented58

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 59in the form of a definition. The great funda-mental notions of philosophers are not proved,their truth is seen. Proofs are nothing butmachinery which helps others to secure thephilosopher's vision. It may be doubted, Iobserve in passing, whether this is not also trueof every scientific principle too. It is reportedof the old Greek philosopher Xenophanes thathe said with reference to the whole universethat the One was God. The Greek phrasewhich is translated ' with reference to thewhole universe

    '

    is commonly, but Mr. Burnet,the great historian of Greek philosophy, saysincorrectly, translated with greater pictur-esqueness, ' looking up to the vault ofHeaven.' At any rate Spinoza looked outupon the universe and declared it to be God :he saw it as a unity and found God there.In like manner the physicist looks out onthe universe and sees it to be a system ofevents. The greatest truths claim but to bestatements of fact which the discoverer seesby looking out upon the world and findingthem there. The only question is whetherhis vision is pure or distorted or partial.Our question in regard to Spinoza is whetherthe God which he sees is not merely a namefor the universe but truly the object of worship,

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    60 SPINOZA AND TIMEof the religious sentiment or emotion. Ifwe seek in Spinoza for our experience of thereligious passion, we find it in the noble andecstatic conception of what he calls the intel-lectual love of God. It arises out of or alongwith the third or highest form of knowledge,intuitive knowledge. Science or reason, thesecond kind of knowledge, is the knowledgeof true universals, those common propertiesof things which I have before alluded to asthe characters of the world of motion andrest, which we would give a great deal thatSpinoza had dwelt upon more fully. Butintuitive knowledge is scientific knowledgeseen in its connection with God. And since allknowledge of things is for Spinoza experienceof ourselves, such knowledge means the ex-perience of our own unification with God ;it enables us to realize all things in theirnecessary connection with God's nature asexpressed by his attributes, it gives us controlof our passions, for it takes us out of ourisolation and gives us communion with otherpersons and with God, it secures us true con-tentment of spirit, something like the tran-quillity of which Epicurus spoke, but a con-tentment which is not empty, but on thecontrary rich in all knowledge, for it pervades

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 61the whole of our action and contemplation withthe sense of the abiding reference of it toGod.

    It is not very easy to make clear to ourselvesthe nature of this intuitive knowledge and itsaccompanying emotion. Spinoza himself illus-trates it by a simple and not very satisfyingexample. He takes the case of finding afourth proportional to three given numbers.Mere science or reason would find it bymultiplying the second and third numberstogether and dividing the product by thefirst. But with simple numbers like I, 2, 3,we recognize intuitively that the fourth pro-portional is 6. The notion is that of an actwhereby truth is recognized without thelabour of demonstration. A later philosopherof our day, Mr. Bradley, has spoken of a feel-ing which is above and supersedes reflection.Our simplest life is that of bare feeling ; thenfollows reflection in which we think of therelations of things ; then comes the feeling inwhich we cease to break up the unity of realitiesinto their separate aspects or features, whichour analytical reflection discloses and in whichit works as in its appropriate medium, and wereturn to the immediacy of our original feeling,but an immediacy which is no longer naive

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    62 SPINOZA AND TIMEand irreflective, but chastened by reflectionand superior to it. Something like this isimplied in the intuitive knowledge of Spinoza.And the emotional condition corresponds. Itis port after stormy seas ; the labour of re-flection, its doubts, its strenuous pain arereplaced by the passionate calm of utterconviction and satisfaction of the mind.No conception however exalted suffers from

    homely illustrations, and a few such willhelp us to approximate to the conditiondescribed. I will take so simple a case as theconviction, after Euclid's demonstration withall the apparatus of geometrical construction,that the three angles of a triangle are equalto two right angles, or the angles at the baseof an isosceles triangle are equal ; when theresult is proved the properties in question areseen and with delighted satisfaction ; that" tempest of the soul is resolved," to use aphrase of Epicurus, with which the process ofreflection was attended, and the delighted spiritenjoys its vision. A still homelier exampleoccurs to me. There is a passage of well-knowndifficulty in Hamlet : " For if the sun breedmaggots in a dead dog, being a God kissingcarrion," and so on. The original text said,' a good kissing carrion,'

    but as the com-

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 63mentators could make no sense of it, one ofthem emended the text and substituted thephrase I quoted, which held its ground,although everybody felt it was too artificialeven for Shakespeare in his earlier years,and certainly in his maturity when he wroteHamlet. But one fine day Sir Walter Raleighpoints out that the phrase ' a good kissingcarrion ' is analogous to ' a good drinkingwater.' Our doubts disappear, and not onlyhave we the conviction that the old text isright, but we bathe in the conviction, and goabout our work for the rest of the day whistling,with the sunshine in our hearts. Every oneknows of the excitement into which Newtonwas thrown when with the newly arrivedcorrected measurements of the distance ofthe moon, he discovered his theory to beverified. Mr. Einstein has not yet betrayedto us what he felt when the news reached himthat the deflection of light from a star by theneighbourhood of the sun had been found ina solar eclipse to be twice what it would beif Newton's law of gravitation were accurate,and that it verified the formula which followedfrom the theory of relativity.These examples may seem to be no more

    than mere scientific or intellectual pleasure in

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    64 SPINOZA AND TIMEa limited subject. Yet they all exhibit therecognition that the limited subject fits intoa whole department of our intellectual worldand the pleasure pervades our whole being.They are at least approximations to the goal.Imagine that any object is conceived in itsrelation to God, and we have on the one sideintuitive knowledge, on the other the unionof ourselves with God, which is the intellectuallove of God.

    Spinoza does not call this intellectual lovereligion, but it is the emotion which in hissystem is nearest to the religious passion, andit is implied in the official account of religionwhich I began this section by quoting. Atthe same time these illustrations help us torecognize a certain defect in Spinoza's con-ception of intellectual love in so far as we takeit to represent religious passion. It seems todescribe the passion in terms of the characterof its object as recognized by intelligence, todescribe it by a symptom rather than intrin-sically. Unless the religious passion werealready lit, it is hard to see how the intellectuallove would rise above a supreme intellectualsatisfaction, and this is not the religious butthe scientific sentiment. Suppose the passionfor God, and this scientific sentiment blazes

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 65up into religion. But the religious passionmust be there to begin with.The defect must not be exaggerated. Forknowing is for Spinoza an action, judgmentis an exercise of will; and to that extent theintellectual recognition of the object of apassion is itself something practical. But itremains true of his whole treatment of theemotions, masterly as it admittedly is, thatit defines the emotions too exclusively inintellectual terms of the knowledge involved ;and is able to do so, because from the beginningemotions are considered as forms of desire.Take as typical his description of love aspleasure accompanied by the idea of anexternal cause, which he contrasts with theaccount given by some that it is the lover'swill to unite himself to the beloved object,an account which he thinks expresses a pro-perty but not the essence of the emotion.The truth is rather reversed. It is ratherSpinoza who is describing by a property. Itis not the lover's recognition of his pleasure(which be it remembered is with Spinoza apassion and a conation) as caused by theobject which makes his pleasure into love. Onthe contrary, it is because his pleasure has thecharacter of love that he recognizes the object

    5

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    66 SPINOZA AND TIMEas its cause. Or in other words the objectinduces a certain reaction on the part of thelover, and it is this emotional reaction, theparticular form of his pleasure, which makeshim recognize the object as lovely and thecause of his pleasure. Just in the same way,I do not eat an apple because I see it to begood to eat, but in so far as it excites in methe blind appetite to eat it I recognize it tobe eatable. The intellectual love of God sofar fails of being religious as it wants thespecial flavour of worship.

    But given thepassion of worship, that passion leads us todiscover and recognize God (supposing weidentify God with the Spinozistic Substance)as the fountain of all our perfect knowledge.It will be seen that the question at issue,betrayed by these difficulties, is whether theground and sum of our knowing is truly theobject of our worship. For the pantheistit is.

    It is outside my subject to ask whetherPantheism is right in this belief. But beforeI pass on to my proper question I will allow my-self to add two more remarks before I tearmyself away from the fascination of intellectuallove. It has been stigmatized as mysticism ;but to my mind that is not in itself a reproach.

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 67There is a sound and a dangerous mysticism.The sound variety is an essential ingredientin all religion ; it is not too much to say thatit is the vital ingredient of religion, withoutwhich religion is a thing of forms. To saythat Spinoza was a mystic is only to say thathe was full of the religious passion. And inthe main his mysticism in its origin fromintuitive knowledge is of the sound variety,reflected in the temper of contentment, oracquiescentia animi, which makes all life aservice of God.The dangerous form of mysticism is that in

    which the worshipper is lost in the adorationof God, and God becomes an infinite abyss ofnegatives, an abstraction which in purportingto be the secret of reality is in fact attenuatedinto the indescribable. Spinoza's conceptionof God does not altogether escape this re-proach, and accordingly in one of its aspectsthe intellectual love of God does not alwaysleave room for the claim of the healthy indi-vidual soul, but tends towards the utterabsorption of the individual in God. It asksfor no answering love from God. It is but aportion of the infinite love with which Godloves himself. It is not only unselfish, beingintensified with the imagination that others are

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    68 SPINOZA AND TIMEjoined with us in this love, but it is selfless.This was the very feature which recommendedSpinoza to the mind of Goethe. But it is thedrawback to which the religion of Pantheismis always liable, and which Spinoza has notcompletely avoided. The healthy religiousmind shares Spinoza's mysticism to the pointof its feeling of our oneness with God ; butit asks for the fathering response, and holdsthat God's need of us is no less than our needof him. It saves the individual from ab-sorption by securing his independent entryinto the relation of dependence upon God,and seeks in God fulfilment of the humanbeing and not absorption. But for Spinozait was difficult to secure such independencebecause God for him, though singular, is notso much an individual as a totality, and isnot a person, for personality is but a finitemode, and his eternity is not duration anymore than the immortality of man is pro-longed life after death.

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    VIIICHANGES IN THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AND

    RELIGION. THE CONATUS OF SPINOZAAND THE NISUS" "DUT now my gloss proceeds." WhenJLJ Time is introduced into the ultimatereality as an essential ingredient, the con-ception of God and of the religious passionis altered at once. If we consider Spinoza,we are at a loss to identify God as the sumof reality with the object of worship ; worship,as we have seen, is with him an intellectualpassion and wants the specific flavour ofdevotion. The difficulty is common to Spinozawith every form of Pantheism. For the pan-theistic Supreme Being lacks the human note.It contains humanity and all other thingsindiscriminately, and it contains evil and goodalike, for what from our human view is evil isnot evil as in the Supreme Being. Whereasworship demands in its object something in-deed greater than man, and different from himin kind, not personality, but still somethingc9

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    70 SPINOZA AND TIMEin touch with

    personality, which therefore inour weakness of imagination we shadowforth to ourselves as a person, and somethingwhich if the predicates of good and bad areinappropriate to what is above good and evil,is yet in the lineal succession of goodness.Now, if the ultimate reality is Space-Time,

    the stuff out of which by various distributionsall things arise, there can be no pretencethat it can be the object of worship, it can nolonger be as such identified with God. Wemust seek accordingly for God, or let us sayrather his divinity, elsewhere, as somecharacter not coextensive with the realitybut contained within it.To find this deity or divinity let us goback to another of Spinoza's conceptions, thatof the conatus which according to him every-

    thing possesses of persisting or perseveringin its being. It belongs to everything, butis best realized from considering organiccreatures. In all their goings-on, various asthese are with the differences of occasionswhich provoke them, the plant or animalmaintains its single individuality of being,abandoning it only to external violence orinternal decay, or perchance in rarer cases(those of divided personality) splitting for the

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 71time into two things each of which persistsin its being, though they may overlap in somerespects and have common use of some portionof the one body in which they are lodged.But the description applies equally to a stoneor a molecule or an atom. The atom persistsin its being in so far as the motions of itsplanetary system of electrons moving round-their central nucleus are conserved. Whenfive alpha particles are emitted in a series,the atom of radium changes to one of lead.Such is the illuminating conception of theconatus. In Spinoza's language we may saythat within the infinite mode of motion andrest, a certain complex of motion and resthas arisen from the original Substance inwhich an equilibrium exists, in virtue whereofthe proportions of motion and rest amongthe parts of the complex retain their pro-portion. But for him, as we have seen,these bodies which thus maintain a movingequilibrium arise by the edict of God, but donot grow from one another in the order oftime or as we say by evolution, but rathersubsist side by side as in a museum of forms.With Time as the other aspect of Space-Time,the animating mind of the body which isSpace, it is easy for us to see, vaguely perhaps

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    72 SPINOZA AND TIMEand yet without doubt, that it is the restlessnessof Space-Time which it owes to its temporalcharacter, which is itself the author of thisvariety of forms, now no longer an array buta procession. Space-Time falls of itself underthe impulse of Time into these distributionsof motion, into the complexes which arebodies, and certain of them attain equilibriumand persist as such. Yet nature infectedwith Time, not as a disease but as its vitality,does not stop, but pushing on, evolves out ofthese stable forms fresh distributions and anew order of beings with their specific characterand their own conatus to persevere in theirtype. Experience shows us this evolution andscience endeavours to exhibit the methodsin detail by which the evolution is effected.

    This striving of Space-Time and of the worldof things heretofore precipitated from thatmatrix, we may call, not by the Spinozisticname of conatus, but by the simpler and vaguename of a nisus. It is not an effort of theworld to go beyond itself. We cannot thinkof the infinite stuff widening its limits, itwould in that case cease to be infinite. Itgoes beyond itself only by the effecting offresh distributions of its motions into newcomplexes of motion. This nisus or effort

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 73of the world as a whole (which as a whole isnever in moving equilibrium and thereforedoes not possess a conatus) is felt or sharedin by the individual forms in which it hasresulted, and hence out of those forms, outof one level in the hierarchy of levels ofexistence, a new level of existence is evolved.This is what we actually observe. Thedescendants of a type of beings becomemodified and suiting themselves to theirenvironment, that is, not only to other beingson their own level or on lower ones, but toall those portions of nature as well whichhave not yet taken the shape of individualforms of beingclimate, weather, magneticvariations, everything which may be summedup as moods of the unorganized world

    changetheir character and become new beings on

    a different level. They were stones, and outof that physical level arises life ; out of life,mind. Thus the nisus of the world as a wholeis reflected in the transformation of typeswhich takes place, as attested by observationand theory, out of lower to higher levels.Like a man caught in the cogs of a machine,material things are caught in the nisus andgive rise to living ones.

    Moreover the nisus of the whole is shared

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    74 SPINOZA AND TIMEat any moment by everything within it,though it is only in those things from whicha new level not yet attained is to proceedthat it is palpable. Life has been evolved andhas been embodied in finite living things ;and mind in sentient things. The nisus wouldseem to have done its work so far as the attain-ment of life or mind is concerned. Yet stillmaterial and living things are caught in thenisus, in virtue of which they sustain the levelabove them, and without which that levelwould disappear, and things would shrinkback to a lower stage. And within the' minds ' of these material or living thingsthemselves the nisus is felt as a nisus towardssomething unattained, and they have theanalogue of what religion is for us. The'

    mind'

    of the stone is a dim striving to-wards life, which for the stone is anunattained level of existence, although wewho come later know that life has taken therealized form of finite living things.Thus the nisus of the world is not like theturning of a squirrel in a cage, a mere repetitionof itself. If that were so, Space-Time wouldbe not what it is, a stuff in which individualforms are moulded, but itself an individual ;instead of an infinite mode of motion, it would

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 75be Substance, and that motion is incompatiblewith the essentially temporal nature of reality.It is the impulse of the world towards newlevels of existence (as well as towards newkinds of being within any one level), and theguarantee that the particular distribution ofmotion attained shall not be permanent asa whole, but only admit those relative per-manences within it which do exhibit theSpinozistic conatus.Each of these levels in the hierarchy ofbeings is characterized by its distinctivequalitymateriality, let us say taking themost prominent examples, life, mind. Wecan now adumbrate the meaning of deity.It is the characteristic quality of the nexthigher level of existence prophesied by thenisus of the universe which has created mindand the finite beings endowed with it, whichobserve are not necessarily only human minds.The beings which would possess such deitywould be finite gods. But when we askwhat for us is God, we must answer that itis the world as a whole with this nisus towardsdeity. If deity were attained, there wouldbe not infinite God but finite gods, and theworld-nisus would carry the distribution ofmotion in turn past them. But for us, into

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    76 SPINOZA AND TIMEwhose experience deity attained does notenter, for whom there are not gods but infiniteGod, God is the being described. His bodyis the whole universe, his mind (or his dis-tinctive form of temporal complex) is infinitedeity. Such deity would not be coextensivewith the whole world. For when we examineempirically the relation of beings of one levelto existence at a lower level we find that thehigher quality is not coextensive with a bodyof the lower level but with a portion of it.The mind, for instance, is coextensive with,Spinoza would say, is the idea of, a portionof the living body, the brain or at mostthe central nervous system. In like mannerwe must conceive deity as belonging notto the world as a whole, but to a portionof it. Only so long as we are thinkingnot of gods but of God, that portion is aninfinite portion, which represents the wholeworld in the same sense as the brain is com-monly believed to represent the whole body,because every affection of the body is directlyor indirectly reflected in the brain. Hence,instead of a God who is identical with thewhole of nature, as with Spinoza, we haveto say that only God's body is so identical,but that God's deity, that which is characteristic

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    SPINOZA AND TIME 77of him, is lodged only in a part of the world.God is immanent in nature, is pantheistic,in respect of his body, but in respect of hisdivinity transcends us, though still remainingwithin nature, and is theistic.The sentiment of religion, the emotion of

    worship compels an explanation upon thesame lines. Sharing in the nisus of theuniverse ; caught as we are in the wheels ofthat being, which arising out of the chaos ofSpace-Time evolves levels of beings withtheir conatus, but always retains the unusedchaos which allows of the emergence of newlevels ; we respond to that nisus in the feelingof oneness with the next higher type of qualitywhich is to arise out of the level we or otherminds have attained. As love, to go back tothe old example, is in its essence a specifiedreaction to an individual of opposite sex, soreligion is the reaction which we make to Godas the whole universe with its nisus towardsthe new quality of deity. But whereas love isa manifestation of the conatus of the humanor animal individual, religious passion is amanifestation of the nisus which the humanbeing possesses because he is caught in thegeneral machinery. It has therefore no specificorgan though it issues in bodily movements of

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    78 SPINOZA AND TIMEsupplication and diffused bodily excitements.And like other emotions it leads us to theintellectual apprehension of its object. Be-cause the whole world in its nisus to deityevokes in us the response of religion, we becomeaware of the world as in this tendency divine,and apprehend God, as we apprehend theobject of love to be lovely. The religiouspassion which we find in ourselves cries outfor an object which intellect then sets itselfthe task of describing in intellectual terms,discovering its relation to observed realities.Thus the gap which we find in Spinozabetween the speculative conception of Godand the religious demand that God should

    be an object of worship, is filled when Timeis acknowledged to be of the very life ofultimate reality. In this process, however,the idea of God suffers, in being thus broughtnear to the common experience of religion,a radical change, and the idea of religionbecomes in some sense, as indeed we feel itto be, a bodily passion, not merely an intel-lectual love.

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    IXCONCLUSION

    SUCH are some, and perhaps the mostimportant consequences which wouldfollow from the substitution of Time forThought in the Spinozistic attributes. Itgoes without saying that no one would proposeto construct a philosophy for himself in thisfashion by trying upon the system of a greatphilosopher the effects of a hypothesis. Hecould in fact only make the hypothesis if hehad himself reached such conclusions already,without deliberately or consciously buildinghimself upon the philosopher in question. 1But he may take pride in showing his affiliationto such a philosopher as Spinoza, and the moreif he is himself a Jew speaking to Jews : andhe may do so I think legitimately by theavowedly unhistorical method of using Spinozato an end which the historic Spinoza wouldnot have entertained. My hearers may think

    1 See the writer's ' Space, Time and Deity.' London,1920. 79

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    80 SPINOZA AND TIMEthat however much I have tried to renderfaithfully the historic meaning of certain partsof Spinoza's doctrine, I have been more con-cerned with the gloss than with the text.But a great man does not exist to be followedslavishly, and may be more honoured by diver-gence than by obedience. As for Spinoza him-self, it is too late a day to express unboundedadmiration. Moreover, no courage is requiredto praise him, for the admirer runs no risk.The Jews will not excommunicate me for myveneration of Spinoza, neither will the Gentilesdenounce this lecture as infamous. He who fora hundred years was Maledictus de Spinoza haslong since recovered his proper name ofBaruch or Benedictus. I have at mostillustrated the commonplace that venerationis not the same thing as idolatry.

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    WHAT THE WORLD OWESTO THE PHARISEESBy the Rkv. R. TRAVERS HERFORD, B.A.

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    POETRY AND RELIGIONBy ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, MA., D.D.Reader in Rabbinic at the University of Cambridge

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