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Updated: June 28, 2025
For the Ethics was condemned with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus as an atheistic and immoral work. Only when the romantic philosophers of Germany, following the lead of Lessing and Jacobi, found in Spinoza a man who was, as they thought, after their own heart, did Spinoza's mundane fortune change.
Let the Salvationist chiefs occupy themselves instead with mastering the principles of Spinoza's 'Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Colenso's 'Pentateuch, and, thrown into the bargain, Sir G. B. Airey's essay on 'The Earlier Hebrew Scriptures. One piece of information, however, in no small degree consoled me for that terrible nightmare of the Salvation Army on the banks of the Tarn.
The impulse on which that dialectic was based may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may be nipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of things unborn. Spinoza's account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialectical psychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities and impossibilities in such a method.
Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to another demonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy Hobbes, for instance my delight in Spinoza's increased perfection, consequent upon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, its external cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbes as well.
It is possible that readers who have followed us so far will now turn away from a philosophy which issues in such conclusions; resentful, perhaps, that it should have been ever laid before them at all, in language so little expressive of aversion and displeasure. We must claim, however, in Spinoza's name, the right which he claims for himself.
The fact is the grand perplexity, and for ourselves we acknowledge that of all theories about it Spinoza's would appear to us the least irrational, setting conscience, and the voice of conscience, aside. The objections, with the replies to them, are well drawn out in the correspondence with William de Blyenburg.
Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary, rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled.
"Surely there is good authority for the view. It was Aristotle's for example, and Spinoza's." "I know," I replied, "and I used to think it was also mine. But of late I have come to realize more clearly what Knowledge is; and now I see, or seem to see, that whatever its value may be, it is something that falls very far short of Good." "Why," he said, "what is your idea of Knowledge?"
It is perhaps not too much to say that any calamity the moment it is apprehended by the reason alone loses nearly all its power to disturb and unfix us. The conclusions which are so alarming are not those of the reason, but, to use Spinoza's words, of the "affects."
Much in him remains obscure, but there is enough which is sufficiently clear to give a direction to thought and to modify action. To the professional metaphysician Spinoza's work is already surpassed, and is absorbed in subsequent systems. We are told to read him once because he is historically interesting, and then we are supposed to have done with him.
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