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Professor Royce spoke last night to an audience that filled Sever 11 to overflowing, on the 17th century period of Naturalism and Rationalism and Spinoza as illustrative of its attitude.
This philosopher, variously known as a cold reasoner, a fatalist, a prophet and a man of beautiful humility of life, stands out from the material thinkers of his time. His religious interest was not passive; it was of the critical, "mystical" kind which teaches that if one learns to see God one sees through the vanities of worldliness; that the tumult of the soul comes from loving things not immertal.
He believed that everything must be explained by its own nature or by a higher nature, and so that there must be some one higher order; this is his "universal order " eternal, infinite, self-determined, complete in itself. This is Spinoza's God. This order must have infinite ways of expression, hence Body and Mind. Whereever there is a body there is a thought, not necessarily produced or effective, but parallel; the human mind is a part of the divine intellect and is a thought thinking of the human body; we are in and of God. The wise man in any state meditates on life not death, the lusts of the world do not touch him and he never ceases to be.
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