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Updated: June 28, 2025
Like his forerunners of old, Spinoza was a prophet in Israel, for Mankind. Spinoza's philosophy has suffered not a little from the highly abstruse and technical form in which the Ethics is written.
"There I am on and under the mountains, seeking the divine in herbis et lapidibus," says he, in Spinoza's own words; and again: "Pardon me if I like to remain silent when people speak of a divine being which I can know only in rebus singularibus."
The early recognition Spinoza received from men like Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society, from Robert Boyle and Huyghens, was hardly adequate recompense for the fine dust he ground which aggravated his inherited tuberculosis and undoubtedly considerably hastened his death. Spinoza's accomplishment in his chosen trade was not merely practical.
He had found temporary peace with Spinoza's God: the eternal infinite-sided Being, of whom all the starry infinities were but one poor expression, and to love whom did not imply being loved in return. 'Twas magnificent to be lifted up in worship of that supernal splendor. But the splendor froze, not scorched.
G.H. Lewes, on 'Spinoza's Life and Works, where effect is defined as cause realised; the natura naturans conceived as natura naturata; and cause or causation is define as simply change. When, says Mr. Lewes, the change is completed, we name the result effect. It is only a matter of naming.
But it matters everything, morally, whether an intellectual good is more or less permanent, more or less inclusive, more or less valuable than a sensory good. This is the real moral problem man is faced with. And this is the moral problem Spinoza considers and solves. Everybody knows what is Spinoza's solution.
Spinoza went further: he appears to have explicitly taught a blind necessity, having denied to the Author of Things understanding and will, and assuming that good and perfection relate to us only, and not to him. It is true that Spinoza's opinion on this subject is somewhat obscure: for he grants God thought, after having divested him of understanding, cogitationem, non intellectum concedit Deo.
So thoroughly does Zangwill believe in the one passion of Spinoza's life, that a score of years after the chief incident of it had transpired, he pictures the philosopher trembling at mention of the woman's name, coughing to conceal his agitation and clutching the doorpost for support.
In those early years, life in the full meaning of the word, is something so new and fresh, and its sensations are so keen and unblunted by repetition, that, in the midst of all its pursuits and without any clear consciousness of what it is doing, the child is always silently occupied in grasping the nature of life itself, in arriving at its fundamental character and general outline by means of separate scenes and experiences; or, to use Spinoza's phraseology, the child is learning to see the things and persons about it sub specie aeternitatis, as particular manifestations of universal law.
It is not altogether fortuitously that Spinoza's psychology embraces so readily contemporary psychological conceptions. Spinoza made a psychological, if not psychoanalytical, analysis of some portions of Scripture. And Scripture is a very rich human material.
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