The imperfection in Spinoza's development of this principle has already been indicated. It is in fact the same imperfection which runs through his whole system. Just as he supposed that the ideas of finite things were at once made consistent with the idea of the infinite when he had named them modes, so here his conception of the change through which selfish natural desire must pass in order to become spiritual is far too superficial and external. Hence he has no sympathy with asceticism, but treats it, like Bentham, as a _torva el tristis superstitio_. Joy is the "transition from less to greater perfection," and cannot be but good; pain is the "transition from greater to less perfection," and cannot be but evil. The revolt against the medieval opposition of the nature and spirit is visible in many of his sayings. "No Deity who is not envious can delight in my weakness or hurts, or can regard as virtues those fears and sighs and tears which are the signs of the mind's weakness; but contrariwise, the greater is our joy, the greater is our progress to perfection, and our participation in the divine nature."[55] "A free man thinks of nothing less than death, his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life."[56] The same idea, combining with the idea of necessity, leads him to condemn repentance and pity, as well as pride and humility. Unconsciously, Spinoza reproduces the principle of asceticism, while in words he utterly rejects it. For though he tells us that pure self-complacency is the highest thing we can hope, yet from this self-complacency all regard to the finite individuality of the subject is eliminated. "Qui Deum amat, conari non potest ut Deus ipsum contra amet." In like manner, he absolutely condemns all hatred, envy, rivalry and ambition, as springing out of an over-estimate of those finite things which one only can possess, while the highest good is that which is enjoyed the more easily and fully the greater the number of participants. Yet Spinoza's exaltation of the social life, and of the love that binds it together, is too like the Buddhist's universal charity that embraces all creatures, and all creatures equally. Both are based on an abstraction from all that is individual, only the Buddhist's abstraction goes a step further, and erases even the distinction between man and the animals. Spinoza felt the pressure of this all-levelling logic when he said, "I confess I cannot understand how spirits express God more than the other creatures, for I know that between the finite and the infinite there is no proportion, and that the distinction between God and the most excellent of created things differs not a whit from the distinction between him and the lowest and meanest of them."[57] As Pope said, God is "as full and perfect in a hair as a heart"; in all finite things there is a ray of divinity, and in nothing more than a ray. Yet in another epistle Spinoza contradicts this view, and declares that, while he does not consider it necessary to "know Christ after the flesh, he does think it is necessary to know the eternal Son of God, i.e. God's eternal wisdom, which is manifested in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Christ Jesus."[58] In the _Ethics_ the distinction of man and the animals is treated as an absolute distinction, and it is asserted with doubtful consistency that the human soul cannot all be destroyed along with the body, for that there is something of it which is eternal. Yet from this eternity we must, of course, eliminate all notion of the consciousness of the finite self as such. At this point, in short, the two opposite streams of Spinoza's thought, the positive method he _intends_ to pursue, and the negative or abstracting method he really _does_ pursue, meet in irreconcilable contradiction. The finite must be related to the infinite so as to preserve all that is in it of reality; and therefore its limit or the negative element in it must be abstracted from. But it turns out that, with this abstraction from a negative element involved in the existence of the finite, the positive also disappears, and God is all in all in a sense that absolutely excludes the existence of the finite. "The mind's intellectual love of God," says Spinoza, "is the very love wherewith God loves himself, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be expressed by the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity; i.e. the mind's intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself."[59] This double "in so far," which returns so frequently in Spinoza, just conceals for a moment the contradiction of two streams of thought, one of which must be swallowed up by the other, if they are once allowed to meet.