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According to Bernfeld, he was the greatest Jewish philosopher since the time of Spinoza, with whose depth of reasoning he combined an ease and straightforwardness of illustration characteristic of Benjamin Franklin. With all this he remained an ardent lover of the Talmud to the last. In fact, his philosophy is distinctively Jewish.
For natural science he shewed little interest, and indeed at that time it scarcely could be reckoned among the ordinary subjects of education; philosophy he pursued rather as a man than as a student, and we are not surprised to find that it was Spinoza rather than Kant or Fichte or Hegel to whom he devoted most attention, for he cared more for principles of belief and the conduct of life than the analysis of the intellect.
Yet the critical philosophy was necessary to exhibit the growing need of solid reorganisation and to prove that the decaying system was incapable of directing the world any longer. Logically it was very imperfect, but it was justified by its success. The destructive work was mainly done in the seventeenth century by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, of whom Hobbes was the most effective.
Spinoza was the first great absolutist, and the impossibility of being intimate with his God is universally recognized. Quatenus infinitus est he is other than what he is quatenus humanam mentem constituit. Spinoza's philosophy has been rightly said to be worked by the word quatenus.
I have not, however, compared the English translation with the original, and must reserve a fuller examination of Giordano Bruno's teaching for another opportunity. Spinoza disbelieved in the world rather than in God. He was an Acosmist, to use Jacobi's expression, rather than an Atheist.
It required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by Spinoza.
In fact, the philosophical principle of Calvinism appears also in the Koran, in Spinoza, and in Cardinal Newman; and persons with no very distinctive Christian belief, like Carlyle or like Professor Royce, may be nevertheless, philosophically, perfect Calvinists. Calvinism, taken in this sense, is an expression of the agonised conscience.
And so Benedict Spinoza, the Rabbi, gentle, spiritual, kind, heir to the Jewish faith, learned in all the refinements of Jewish Law, knowing minutely the history of the race, knowing that for which the curses of Judaism were reserved, perceiving with unblinking eyes the absurdity and folly of all dogmatic belief, gradually withdrew from practising and following "Law," preferring his own commonsense.
The first is contradicted by facts, the second by the instinct of conscience. Even Spinoza allows that for practical purposes we are obliged to regard the future as contingent, and ourselves as able to influence it; and it is incredible that both our inward convictions and our outward conduct should be built together upon a falsehood.
First, It has been said against Spinoza, according to the scholastic way of talking, rather than thinking, that a mode, not being any distinct or separate existence, must be the very same with its substance, and consequently the extension of the universe, must be in a manner identifyed with that, simple, uncompounded essence, in which the universe is supposed to inhere.
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