All Things Excellent Are as Difficult as They Are Rare
The Book of Spinoza 6 · 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. The Order reads chapter 6 under the sixth axiom: difficult and rare have one and the same cause.
6.1My book is finished. At the end I have one question to answer.
6.2Someone will say: if the road you point to is as good as you say, why does almost nobody walk it?
6.3There is a false idea hidden in that question — that what is good ought to be easy.
6.4So I set down at the very end the last sentence of the whole work:
6.5All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
6.6Do not read that as two facts.
6.7It does not say: it is hard, and also uncommon. It says: it is uncommon because it is hard, and hard because it is uncommon.
6.8Difficult and rare are two names for one thing.
6.9Why should that be? Look at how such a thing comes to stand at all.
6.10A heap of loose stones can be arranged ten thousand ways. Scatter them and you have one of the ten thousand.
6.11Set as an arch, only a very few arrangements will stand.
6.12So an arch is rare. So an arch is hard. That is one sentence, not two.
6.13Everything strives, so far as it lies in its own power, to persevere in its being. The finer the thing, the more that striving costs.
6.14The best things in a man — the power not to rage, the power to see himself, the power to take people as they are — are arches and not heaps.
6.15Any day you stop holding it up is a day it comes down. (cf. The Highest Covenant 6.3)
6.16So do not ask why nobody wants a thing this good.
6.17Ask what you spent on it today.
6.18The road I have pointed to is exceedingly hard. But it can be found.
6.19Were it easy, everyone would have had it long ago, and this book would not have been worth writing.
6.20All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.