On the contrary, the man who does not believe himself free believes he is
in the hands of God, and that is the beginning of wisdom and the beginning
of virtue. We are in the hands of God as the clay is in those of the
potter; the mad vase would be the one which reproached the potter for
having made it small instead of big, common instead of decorative. It is
the beginning of wisdom to believe oneself in the hands of God; to see Him,
to see Him the least indistinctly that we can, therein lies the highest
wisdom; we must see His designs, or at least His great design and associate
ourselves with it, thus becoming not only part of Him, which we always are,
but a conscient part of Him.

This is the love of God, and the love of God is virtue itself. We ought to
love God without consideration of the good He can do us and of the
penalties He can inflict upon us; for to love God from love of a beneficent
God or from fear of a punitive God is not to love God but to love oneself.

THE PASSIONS.--We have our passions as enemies and as obstacles to
our elevation to this semi-perfection. It is they which cause us to do
immoral acts. "Immoral," has that a meaning from the moment that we do
nothing which we are not obliged to do? Yes, just as when led by our
deceitful mind we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, the fact of
this thought being necessary does not prevent it from being false; we may
have been led by necessity to commit a villainous action, but that does not
prevent its being immoral. The passions are our imperfections, omissions,
gaps in a soul which is not full of the idea of God and of universal order
and the love of God and of universal order, and which, in consequence,
lives individually--that is, separated from the universe.

The passions are infinite in number and Spinoza, in a bulky volume,