You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Every epoch-making hypothesis has had its anticipators, who have groped after the truth without finding it. Freud's theory was, in part, anticipated by Spinoza, whose system, like that of Freud, is based upon a strict determinism. It is this determinism which has been one main cause of the opposition to Spinoza and Freud. Spinoza's system starts with a consideration of the nature of God. But the Deus of Spinoza is divested of all anthropomorphism. To Spinoza, 'good' and 'bad' are merely human, and relative conceptions. Mind and body are, in Spinoza's view, but two aspects of one reality, and it is to this reality that he gives the name of 'God'. Intellect and will are identical. Spinoza desires to deal with human emotions in a purely scientific spirit, and as conforming to the ordinary laws of nature. Only by thus understanding emotions can we obtain any power to control them. The conceptions of mental conflict and repression, and the distinction between conscious and unconscious desire, are contained in Spinoza's Ethics, although he, of course, does not use the terms. Everything endeavours to persist in its own being. For this endeavour, Spinoza uses the term conatus, and there is reason to regard this term as preferable to that of libido. Spinoza grasps the essential character of the sex instinct, and takes the term 'love' in a very extended sense, although there are indications that he had not overcome his own sex repressions. He understands the influence of narcissism. And we could not have a better description of the manner in which a repressed desire may be replaced in consciousness by its opposite than that which he gives us. The state of mind which resignedly accepts what is necessary is treated of by Spinoza under the term amor intellectualis Dei, and bears a striking resemblance to that which is attained by complete analysis. The whole argument of the final part of the Ethics is devoted to the glorification of the 'free' man, the fully