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Updated: May 28, 2025
I here seek no other judge than the most just impression of the common sense that is spread among the human race.... Now, since common sense revolts against each of Spinosa's propositions, no less than against the first, of which they are the pretended proofs, instead of stopping to reason on each of these proofs where common sense is lost, we should be right to say to him: Your principle is contrary to common sense; from a principle in which common sense is lost, nothing can issue in which common sense is to be found again."
The lady, believing her father-confessor, loaded the pretender with valuable gifts; presented him with her jewels; and was so attracted by his appearance that it was said she was willing to break her vows for his sake, and to share his throne with him. Unfortunately for the conspirators, before the plot was ripe, Spinosa's indiscretion ruined it.
Thus he deals with Spinosa's third proposition, that, in the case of things that have nothing in common with one another, one cannot be the cause of the other. This proposition, Diderot contends, is false in all moral and occasional causes. The sound of the name of God has nothing in common with the idea of the Creator which that name produces in my mind.
Mathematics, for instance, intellectual philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable to me; I shrunk from them with a sense of powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an anguish the greater from remembering the time when I grappled with them to my own hourly delight; and for this further reason, because I had devoted the labour of my whole life, and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of constructing one single work, to which I had presumed to give the title of an unfinished work of Spinosa's viz., De Emendatione Humani Intellectus.
The system is monstrous, it is absurd and ridiculous. It is Spinosa's plausible method that has deceived people; they supposed that one who employed geometry, and proceeded by way of axioms and definitions, must be on the track of truth. They did not see that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre.
Is there a world, and earth, and sky? Berkeley's doctrine Spinosa's doctrine! Dear reader, I had at that time never read either Berkeley or Spinosa. I have still never read them; who are they, men of yesterday?
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