Baruch Spinoza on Writing

"I proposed not to bore you with any more of my metaphysics or ethics, but I will say a word by way of conclusion. If you want any more, go to Spinoza and Schopenhauer, where I get mine."

"Spinoza in particular belongs to the immortal authors. He is great because of the sublime simplicity of his thoughts and his way of writing, great because of his distance from all scholasticism, and, on the other hand, from all false embellishment or ostentation of language."

"Spinoza has long intrigued me, and for years I've wanted to write about this valiant seventeenth-century thinker, so alone in the world—without a family, without a community—who authored books that truly changed the world. He anticipated secularization, the liberal democratic political state, and the rise of natural science, and he paved the way for the Enlightenment. The fact that he was excommunicated by the Jews at the age of twenty-four and censored for the rest of his life by the Christians had always fascinated me, perhaps because of my own iconoclastic proclivities. And this strange sense of kinship with Spinoza was strengthened by the knowledge that Einstein, one of my first heroes, was a Spinozist. When Einstein spoke of God, he spoke of Spinoza's God—a God entirely equivalent to nature, a God that includes all substance, and a God “that doesn't play dice with the universe”—by which he means that everything that happens, without exception, follows the orderly laws of nature."

"When he arrived in Amsterdam at age fifty-one , Locke had published nothing. During what was clearly a transformational period, he used his time in Holland to talk with other independent thinkers who had been hounded into exile by the governments and churches of their own countries. Although Spinoza was dead, Locke certainly met many of the philosopher's admirers and enemies. He was well acquainted with nonconformist Protestant Collegiants, and his later writings would advocate complete toleration for all forms of Protestantism. At the time of Locke's death, his library contained all of Spinoza's published works as well as many political and religious disputations, in many languages, in which Spinoza's ideas were vigorously debated. Locke, like Hobbes, Adam Smith, and David Hume, is much more widely recognized than Spinoza in the United States as an influence upon the Enlightenment views of the American founders, but the more radical Spinoza's voice can be heard in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. It is not surprising that Thomas Jefferson's library contained Spinoza's collected works, which were more readily available at the end of the eighteenth century than in Locke's time."

"Between 1854 and 1856, while Bain and Spencer were publishing their first major studies of psychology, George Eliot was immersed in the task of translating Spinoza's Ethics . Before the middle of the nineteenth century, relatively little attention had been given to Spinoza by British philosophers, in part because his geometrical style of metaphysics was antithetical to the spirit of eighteenth-century empiricism, and also because of his unpalatable reputation as an atheist. As Lewes remarked, "the accusation of Spinozism was another name for atheism, and deliberate yielding of the soul to Satan". Although Coleridge had absorbed Spinoza's writing as part of his immersion in Continential metaphysics, and Shelley too had been drawn to his religious radicalism, no one before Eliot's generation championed the philosopher in the way that Goethe had done in Germany. By 1878, however, the philosopher Frederick Pollock was commenting in the journal Mind that "in the Ethics of Spinoza we have one of the most remarkable achievements of constructive philosophic genius ever given to the world." Such keen praise was commonly accepted by this time as being neither eccentric nor misguided. Lewes, who was among the first in Britain to give Spinoza serious critical consideration, believed the Ethics opened "a new era in History." Carlyle's literary executor, J. A. Froude, who grudgingly acknowledged in 1855 that "Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or set aside," eventually became another important channel for the dissemination of his ideas. There was, then, an increasingly wide spread recognition in the second half of the nineteenth century that Spinoza was a central figure in modern thought, an opinion few in Britain endorsed before the 1850s."