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Updated: June 28, 2025
The only other book Spinoza published in his lifetime the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus bore on its title page Spinoza's initials only, and the name of a fictitious Hamburg publisher. It was then an open secret who the author was. Spinoza's personal rule to incur as little official displeasure as possible made him abandon his final literary project entertained in 1675.
You must tie your opinion to Aristotle's or Spinoza's; you must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn.
So far as the metaphysicians are carpenters, and there is much carpentering in most of them, Goethe was right, and the larger part of their industry endures wind and weather but for a short time. Spinoza's object was not to make a scheme of the universe.
Spinoza's Ethics appeared in 1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory of The Communication of Substances, which he illustrates in the following manner:
Still, the incident showed quite clearly that though Spinoza did not desire to be a martyr, he was no more afraid to die than he was to live for the principles he had at heart. Spinoza's character, manifested in his life, has won the high admiration of every one not bitterly hostile to him.
Spinoza's chief aim is to free us from this sorrow, and to free us from it by THINKING. The emphasis on this word is important. He continually insists that a thing is not unreal because we cannot imagine it.
And so, on your own hypothesis, Good, after all, would not be that which eternally exists, but something which has to be realized in time namely, a change of mind on the part of all rational beings, whereby they view the world no longer in a partial imperfect way, but, in Spinoza's phrase, 'sub specie æternitatis'"
George Eliot was writing an article on Weimar for Fraser, on Cumming for Westminster, and translating Spinoza's Ethics. No name was signed to these productions, as it would not do to have it known that a woman wrote them. The education of most women was so meagre that the articles would have been considered of little value. Happily Girton and Newnham colleges are changing this estimate of the sex.
At every turn the old man could not suppress some mournful exclamation, showing what hopes Louis' precocious genius had raised, and the terrible grief into which this irreparable ruin had plunged him. "That young fellow knew everything, my dear sir!" said he, laying on the table a volume containing Spinoza's works. "How could so well organized a brain go astray?"
I may be wrong, but I suspect that one of the later uses of "actus," as quoted in Ducange, affected Spinoza's Latinity. Thus several ecclesiastical writers are quoted as using the word in the sense of office, or function. Surely this would suit Spinoza's definition of the mind. For he treats it as a centre of phenomenal activity amidst the infinite modes of the divine attribute. Corollarium.
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