United States or Turkmenistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Hobbes made everything material and subjected it to mathematical laws alone; Spinoza also divested God of intelligence and choice, leaving him a blind power, whence all emanates of necessity. The theologians of the two Protestant parties are equally zealous in refuting an unendurable necessity.

She hated everything irresolute or vague; people might play at cat's-cradle or study Spinoza, just as they pleased; but, whatever they did, they must give their minds to it. She kept house from an easy-chair, and ruled her dependants with severity tempered by wit, and by the very sweetest voice in which reproof was ever uttered.

Because to him the mind was the "idea" of the body, and the body the "object" not quite in the modern sense of the mind. But as regards the human mode of the divine attribute of thought, Spinoza makes its ideal to be a life absorbed in such contemplation of "the Blessed God," the infinite Whole, as shall react on the creature in inspirations of freedom, purity and love.

The early recognition Spinoza received from men like Henry Oldenburg, the first secretary of the Royal Society, from Robert Boyle and Huyghens, was hardly adequate recompense for the fine dust he ground which aggravated his inherited tuberculosis and undoubtedly considerably hastened his death. Spinoza's accomplishment in his chosen trade was not merely practical.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, November, 1632, of a fairly prosperous Jewish family, originally from Portugal. He received thorough instruction in the language and literature of the Hebrews, and in addition became a good Latin scholar, so far as to write and correspond in that language. He was early interested in philosophy, and especially attracted for a time by the writings of Descartes.

The philosophy of Spinoza exercised a powerful influence upon the mind of Kant, and the master-minds and great poets of modern times, particularly of Germany, have drawn copiously from the deep wells of his suggestive thought. His poem entitled "The Basia or Kisses" has been translated into the principal European languages.

The canal that leads from Leiden to Katwyk-aan-Zee passes the houses of Descartes and Spinoza; and altogether the short journey by water did not lack interest, for Katwyk has become a colony of artists.

Often he would go to church with them and coming home would discuss the sermon with them at length. The Lutheran pastor who came to call on the family invited Spinoza to join his flock, and they calmly discussed the questions of baptism and regeneration by faith together; but genius only expresses itself to genius, and the pastor went away mystified.

But thought and study brought Mazzini what it rarely brings to these young men the necessity to find something in which he could believe. He had not long to seek for a basis to his creed, because he was one of the men from the prophets of old to Spinoza, from Spinoza to Gordon, to whom the existence of God is a matter of experience rather than an object of faith.

Spinoza soon found the learning of the Synagogue insufficient and unsatisfactory. He sought the wisdom of secular philosophy and science. But in order to satisfy his intellectual desires it was necessary to study Latin. And Latin was not taught in the Synagogue.