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Both systems of necessity lead to Spinosism, nay, to all the horrible consequences attributed to it by Spinoza's enemies. O, why did Andrew Fuller quit the high vantage ground of notorious facts, plain durable common sense, and express Scripture, to delve in the dark in order to countermine mines under a spot, on which he had no business to have wall, tent, temple, or even standing-ground!
Voltaire, treating upon Spinosism, says: “I am aware that various philosophers, and especially Lucretius, have denied final causes. I am also aware that Lucretius, though not very chaste, is a very great poet in his descriptions and in his morals; but in philosophy I own he appears to me to be very far behind a college porter or a parish beadle.
Again, he says, "that an immaterial substance cannot be said to have extent, but as we say of fire contain in a piece of iron, which has not, properly speaking, any other extension than that of the iron itself" According to these notions we shall be justified in taxing him with having announced in a very clear, in a most unequivocal manner, that this is nature herself: this indeed is a pure Spinosism; it was decidedly on the principles of Descartes that Spinosa drew up his system; in fact it flows out of it consecutively.
Then returning to Leyden, full of his pious design of undertaking the ministry, he found, to his surprise, unexpected obstacles thrown in his way, and an insinuation dispersed through the university, that made him suspected, not of any slight deviation from received opinions, not of any pertinacious adherence to his own notions in doubtful and disputable matters, but of no less than Spinosism, or, in plainer terms, of atheism itself.
The same want of just inference, the same discrepancy, will obtrude themselves in the principles of the celebrated Father Malebranche; which, if considered with the slightest attention, appear to conduct directly to Spinosism; in fact, can any thing be more in unison with the language of Spinosa himself, than to say, as does Malebranche, "that the universe is only an emanation from God; that we see every thing in God, that every thing we see is only God; that God alone does every thing that is done; that all the action, with every operation that takes place in nature, is God himself; in a word, that God is every being and the only being."
There is neither more nor less; it is all God; all, all are but 'Deus infinite modificatus': in brief, both systems are not Spinosism, for no other reason than that the logic and logical consequency of 10 Fullers + 10 X 10 Dr. Priestleys, piled on each other, would not reach the calf of Spinoza's leg.
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