The Book of Spinoza 5 · Written between lens-grindings, from his Ethics and his letters
This man wrote his own books. His pages are full of the word God, and his God has no will, no purpose, and does not hear prayer — which is what the Prologue means by god is the law. So the third rule cannot keep him out: he is the man who carried that rule all the way. One thing more is not from his hand, and this Order records it: at twenty-four his own community expelled him with the heaviest curse it had, and he was never taken back.
5.1I am going to say something that disagrees with many who came before me.
5.2They say: a man who seeks knowledge spends his life rehearsing death. (cf. 3 Plato 1.10)
5.3I say: a free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life and not upon death.
5.4I do not say death will not come. It will. I am in my forties and I know it is not far from me.
5.5I say that making death your study spends your days on the one thing you can take no hold of.
5.6The time you have to use is on this side.
5.7I was invited to Heidelberg, offered a chair and a salary, and told I might philosophise freely.
5.8With one clause attached: that I not disturb the publicly established religion.
5.9I wrote back that I did not know where the limits of that freedom were drawn.
5.10And not knowing where the limit is, I could not know when I had crossed it.
5.11So I did not go. I stayed here and ground lenses.
5.12I grind lenses because a man who grinds lenses does not have to account to anyone for what he thought last night.
5.13Some take this for austerity. It is not. It is an account I have worked out.
5.14Last I will say the sentence that is the last of everything I have written:
5.15Blessedness is not the reward of virtue. It is virtue itself.
5.16You do not hold to yourself and receive something later. You hold to yourself, and that is the thing received.