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An anonymous German taught Spinoza the rudiments of the language that was to enable him to enter into the important current of modern ideas especially embodied in the philosophy of Descartes. Francis Van den Ende gave him a thorough technical, not literary, mastery of it. And Van den Ende taught Spinoza much more besides.
John often speak of the strange doctrine to which Desmarais referred, "you are, then, a believer in the fatalism of Spinoza?" "No, Monsieur," said Desmarais, with a complacent smile, "my system is my own: it is composed of the thoughts of others; but my thoughts are the cords which bind the various sticks into a fagot."
In the psychical world that quality which we call spirituality may be associated with and evoked by Theism, or the belief in a Divine Father; by Pantheism, as in the case of Spinoza, whose face at the very first glance impresses you with its spiritual cast; or even by the Buddhist belief in Nirvana.
The denial of substantiality to individual things, brought in by the occasionalists, is completed by Spinoza, who boldly and logically proclaims pantheism on the basis of Cartesianism and gives to the divine All-one a naturalistic instead of a theological character. Spinoza.%
Demonstrations of this kind were the characteristics of the period. Des Cartes had set the example of constructing them, and was followed by Cudworth, Clarke, Berkeley, and many others besides Spinoza.
"At the same epoch, Helvetius, who combated the dogma of the spagyrics, received from another unknown a powder of projection with which he converted an ingot of lead into gold. Helvetius was not precisely a charlatan, neither was Spinoza, who verified the experiment, a credulous simpleton.
It was an unexpressed maxim with Spinoza that even at the risk of keeping our heads empty it is necessary we keep our minds simple and pure. The central controlling idea of Spinoza's philosophy is that all things are necessarily determined in Nature, which he conceives to be an absolutely infinite unified and uniform order.
The fundamental ideas of the Spinozistic system, and those which render it important, are rationalism, pantheism, the essential identity of the material and spiritual worlds, and the uninterrupted mechanism of becoming. Besides the twisting of ethical concepts just mentioned, we may briefly note the most striking of the other difficulties and contradictions which Spinoza left unexplained.
The proof of the first of these propositions, using language somewhat different from that of the text, is as follows: There is no affection of the body of which the mind cannot form some clear and distinct conception, that is to say, of everything perceived it is capable of forming a clear and adequate idea, not exhaustive, as Spinoza is careful to warn us, but an idea not distorted by our personality, and one which is in accordance with the thing itself, adequate as far as it goes.
Far from it being necessary to tell the masses only the truth Spinoza believed, as did Plato before him, that it may even be necessary in order to rule the masses successfully in the ways of wisdom and virtue to deceive them to a greater or lesser extent. Such deception is, as a political expediency, morally justified, for the rulers would be lying in the interests of virtue and truth.
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