Baruch Spinoza on Creativity

"— the deepest, most original thinker to emerge from our people from the end of the Bible to the birth of Einstein."

"...Spinoza became aware of this in a way that made him show his true colours , when, one afternoon, rummaging around among who knows what memories, he turned his attention to the question of what actually remained for him, himself, of that famous morsus conscientiae - he who had relegated good and evil to man's imagination and angrily defended the honour of his 'free' God against the blasphemists who asserted that God operates everything sub ratione boni . For Spinoza, the world had returned to that state of innocence in which it had lain before the invention of bad conscience: what had then become of morsus conscientiae?..."

"...The influence of Spinozism attained its height in Germany when it overwhelmed Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, the mental giants of Weimar. Weimar was the cradle of modern German culture. It is to the new Germany what Athens was to ancient Hellas, or Jerusalem to ancient Judea, a sea of light and the center of creative genius. From Weimar emanated all the great cultural traditions of the Fatherland, which secured for Germany her proud position in the realm of European culture. Over this spirit of Weimar hovered the genius of Baruch Spinoza. It was here that Spinozism became a dominating influence in the life of the new German culture. But in this process of expansion it was transformed into something different from the original doctrine of the philosopher. The creative geniuses of Weimar could not possibly become reconciled to the mechanistic world-picture from which personality was banished. To Goethe personality was the highest gift of the Gods to man and enjoyed an even higher place in his affections than did Spinozism. The same can be said of many other poets who later embraced some form of Spinozism."