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Plato, called the Divine by reason of the excellence of his wisdom, defrayed his travelling expenses in Egypt by the profits derived from the oil which he sold during his journey. Spinoza maintained himself by polishing glasses while he pursued his philosophical investigations. Linnaeus, the great botanist, prosecuted his studies while hammering leather and making shoes.
And to believe this or that to be true does not depend upon our will. This applies to Roman Catholics as to Protestants, to atheists as to deists. Locke, however, perhaps thought that the speculative opinion of atheism, which was uncommon in his day, does depend on the will. He would have excluded from his State his great contemporary Spinoza.
Again social politics as much as established religion demanded the action the Synagogue took. Their experience with Uriel da Costa was still very fresh in their minds and they must have felt fairly confident that Spinoza would be warned by the fate of his heretical predecessor if not counseled by the wisdom of the Fathers. But Spinoza was of a firmness they did not reckon on.
Spinoza said, of things which have nothing in common, one cannot be the cause of the other; and to me it seems eminently unphilosophic to believe a Being having nothing in common with anything, capable of creating or causing everything. 'Only matter can be touched or touch; and as the Christian's God is not material, his adorers are fairly open to the charge of superstition.
J. Allanson Picton, Spinoza, p. 213. To say that religious thought is passing to-day through a period of peculiar stress is to utter a commonplace so threadbare that one apologises for repeating it.
In his History of my Botanical Studies Goethe mentions, besides Shakespeare and Spinoza, Linnaeus as one who had most influenced his own development. Concerning Linnaeus, however, this is to be understood in a negative sense.
Between the dogmatism of a Spinoza or a Leibniz and the criticism of Kant there is just the same distance as between "it may be maintained that " and "it suffices that ." Kant stops this dogmatism on the incline that was making it slip too far toward the Greek metaphysics; he reduces to the strict minimum the hypothesis which is necessary in order to suppose the physics of Galileo indefinitely extensible.
Multiplicity, the self-dependence of particular things, free choice, ends, development, all this is illusion and error. Why, then, only one and why infinite? With Spinoza as with Descartes independence is the essence of substantiality.
The system of Spinoza, as developed in his "Tractatus Theologico-politicus," and, still more, in his "Ethica," a posthumous publication, may be said to contain the germs of the whole system both of Theological and Philosophical Rationalism which was subsequently unfolded, in the Church, by Paulus, Wegscheider, and Strauss, and, in the Schools, by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
All dogmatism, in the pristine connotation of unexamined adherence to the doctrines of tradition, is absent from his thought. Spinoza is thoroughly critical, for only modern philosophic arrogance, in first full bloom in Kant, can justly monopolize the term "critical" for itself.
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