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Updated: June 28, 2025
Spinoza was not present when excommunication was pronounced upon him. He had left Amsterdam to stay with some Collegiant friends on the Ouwerkerk road, for, so one tradition relates, an attempt had been made by one of the over-righteous upon Spinoza's life soon after he became an object of official displeasure.
Although this latter "realistic" party undoubtedly has the advantage over the former, which reads into Spinoza a subjectivism foreign to his system, they ought not to forget that the difference in interpretation has for its basis a conflict among the motives which control Spinoza's thinking.
Here Spinoza and Rousseau are at one. It was relevant to Spinoza's purpose to treat only of religious ceremonial law; but his conclusions apply with equal force and relevancy to social and political ceremonial law as well. Spinoza's distinction between ceremonial and divine law is peculiarly significant and illuminating when applied to marriage.
Colerus' sources of information were the best: he spoke to all who knew Spinoza at the Hague; and he himself was intimate with the Van der Spijcks with whom Spinoza had lived the last five years of his life, and with whom Colerus was now living in Spinoza's very room.
Is there a world, and earth, and sky? Berkeley's doctrine Spinoza's doctrine! Dear reader, I had at that time never read either Berkeley or Spinoza. I have still never read them; who are they, men of yesterday?
To his followers Hegel is the true prophet of the only true philosophic creed, to his opponents, he has, in Professor James's words, "like Byron's corsair, left a name 'to other times, linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes." The feelings of attraction to Hegel or repulsion from him do not emanate from his personality. Unlike Spinoza's, his life offers nothing to stir the imagination.
But neither his certainty nor Spinoza's will be of any use to a man who has no such idea, and who cannot recognise the lawfulness of the method by which it is arrived at. From the self-existing substance it is a short step to the existence of God.
Those who have achieved at least some of the new simplicity in thought and expression are better able than any others to enter into the heart of Spinoza's philosophy, into the open secret of his thought.
But the failure of these sciences to give us a picture of the living world in no way invalidates their truth, or deprives them of their utility. Consider, as an example, Spinoza's psychological law freely expressed in the dictum that Paul's idea of Peter tells us more about Paul than about Peter.
But if we cannot believe Spinoza's system taken in its entire completeness, yet we may not blind ourselves to the disinterestedness and calm nobility which pervades his theories of human life and obligation. He will not hear of a virtue which desires to be rewarded. Virtue is the power of God in the human soul, and that is the exhaustive end of all human desire.
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