Spinoza and Imagination.

For Spinoza, our reality is perfect, and could not have been in any other way than it is, as the infinite Substance contains the most perfect reality of existence. If you study some Biology to complement your philosophical studies, something that I advice you to do to understand how utterly senseless is our life on this planet, you can read some George C. Williams, for he was one of the great biologists of the twentieth century, together with Bill Hamilton and Robert Trivers. He also knew perfectly well how amoral and self-destructive could be our nature and nature as a material system of life. Stephen C. Stearns writes in his Biographical Memoir available online: 

George was a progressive liberal concerned about socially significant misunderstanding or abuse of evolutionary theory, especially the “naturalistic fallacy,” whereby people try to justify behavior by claiming that “natural” is “good.” In an essay that accompanied a reprinting of T. H. Huxley’s 1893 essay on evolutionary morality, George (1989) characterized natural selection as “a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness” and found much of nature, including our own selfish genes, a “morally unacceptable, powerful and persistent” enemy, concluding that “we need all the help we can get in trying to overcome billions of years of selection for selfishness.” In 1993 he repeated that message in a chapter strikingly titled “Mother Nature Is a Wicked Old Witch”:

       A century of progress in biology confirms Huxley’s thesis: the universe is hostile to life in general and human life in particular; the evolutionary process and its products are contrary to human ethical standards; human ethical advance can be achieved only in opposition to the cosmic process. 

When interviewed about his views on evolutionary morality in 1998 (Roes, 1998), George reemphasized the brutal nature of natural selection.

   Natural selection maximizes short-sighted selfishness, no matter how much pain or loss it produces. There are far more losers than winners, and great losses often arise from trivial gains. The killing of monkey infants for minor male reproductive gain is the example that most persuasively led me to use words like evil … As to its stupidity, natural selection produces what seem to be ingenious devices, like eyes and hands and the human capacity for language, but a close examination shows these devices to be just the sorts of things that can arise from trial and error … As a result, all organisms are burdened with maladaptive historical legacies.

George felt that only by being aware of the morally unacceptable elements in human nature could we hope to find our better angels.

This is the same thing Richard Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. In fine: I think Spinoza lacked imagination (empathy) to understand how evil life can be from the perspective of human decency and a little sense of justice, which Schopenhauer had. You do not need to go only to humans; you can study the whole animal kingdom to see the sheer terror of killing and not being killed, with a life-span short and brutal, only to pass the genes to another generation. And this is the perfect reality of Substance, the perfect world it offers. The mind of Spinoza, devoted to the love of Absolute power, the most powerful Substance, ignored charity, empathy and some human imagination, as Santayana correctly says. With some imagination comes empathy and the sense of justice. That Spinoza lacked this kind of imagination and empathy can be gathered from that anecdote which tells us that “According to Colerus, an early biographer, Spinoza liked to amuse himself by transferring a spider he had caught into a rival spiderʼs web, pitting them against each other in mortal combat. Another variation was throwing a fly or two into the mix. These insect battles reportedly made Spinoza roar with laughter” (Wikipedia). This is the laughter of a man without imagination, for, as Santayana once wrote in his work Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), “Imagination is the great unifier of humanity.” Imagination teaches empathy, charity, piety for the world, as Virgil and Schopenhauer knew and felt themselves so well.